Graduate Students

Sakena Abedin
Harvard College, B.A.; Stanford University, M.A.; Washington University, M.D.
Sakena grew up in El Paso, TX, but has since lived on both coasts and in the midwest.  After finishing medical school, she completed a residency in pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale, where she began work on an ethnographic study of teaching and learning in a clinic staffed by pediatric residents.  Sakena is interested in studying physicians' representations of the doctor-patient relationship, and how they reflect ideas about medical care and practice.  She is also interested in the history of U.S. healthcare policy, particularly initiatives meant to improve the quality and equity of the healthcare system. 
sakena.abedin@yale.edu

Justin Barr
Washington University, B.A.
Raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Justin graduated from Washington University in 2006 with an A.B. in History. After spending a summer teaching English in Hanoi, he worked for the US government for a year writing the history of the Special Forces medic and examining its links to physician assistant programs. This project corresponds to Justin's more general interest in military medical history and its ties to civilian medicine. Also a student at the University of Virginia's medical school, Justin plans to pursue a career that interdigitates his passion for medicine and history.
justin.barr@yale.edu

Mary Brazelton
Harvard University, B.A.
Mary Augusta Brazelton graduated from Harvard University in 2008 with an A.B. in History and Science and a language citation in Mandarin. Mary's research focus in on the history of medicine and science in 20th-century China, particularly questions of medical professionalization and the biomedical sciences in the early years of the People's Republic. Her broader interests also include the role of medicine and public health in Sino-American relations and state formation in late imperial China and the Republic of China.

mary.brazelton@yale.edu

Jessica Cecilia Cardenas-Navia
Yale, B.A.
Cecilia has deferred matriculation in 2006 in order to pursue a M.A. degree in History of Science at Cambridge University. She will join us in the 2007-2008 academic year.
jessica.cardenas-navia@yale.edu

Brian Casey
Loyola, B.A.; Loyola B.S.; Yale, M.A.; Yale M.S; Yale M.Phil.
Having majored in History and Biology as an undergraduate and having pursued graduate training in Genetics and Religious Studies, Brian is most interested in studying historical encounters of science and religion in the twentieth century. More specifically, he is interested in the scientific and metaphysical controversies that played a part in the development of the life sciences. Currently, he is working on a dissertation dealing with neurophysiology and dualism. Among his other interests are The Scientific Revolution, History of the Life Sciences, and History of Medicine (especially History of Germ Theory and History of Psychology).
brian.casey@yale.edu

Helen Anne Curry
Harvard, B.A.
Helen studies the history of 20th century biology, with a focus on genetics and plant science, as well as the history of agriculture and environment. Her dissertation is a history of techniques and technologies used in the genetic modification of plants from the 1920s to the 1960s. It emphasizes two components of this history in particular: the role of agricultural interests in shaping the science of genetics, and the enthusiastic response of both scientists and the public to technologies that promised greater speed and control in the production of new plant varieties. An active participant in the History of Science Program, Helen also helps to coordinate Yale's Environmental History group. When not writing or teaching, she can be found running the trails of East Rock Park.
helen.curry@yale.edu

Deborah Doroshow
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.
Debbie hails from sunny Los Angeles, but has spent 7 years in Boston, where she was an undergraduate concentrator in History and Science and a medical student, both at Harvard.  She couldn't decide whether to do science or humanities in college and picked the one major that encompassed them both, a decision that worked out so well that she is now planning to both practice medicine and be a historian.  How that will be executed remains an enticing mystery.  She is interested in the history of psychiatry, children's health, and medicine in 20th century America, particularly notions of therapeutic efficacy and (ab)normality, and especially loves doing oral histories with old retired physicians. She has published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences on insulin coma therapy in mid-twentieth-century psychiatry, and her piece on the history of bedwetting alarms will appear in the June 2010 issue of Isis.  In her free time, you can find her singing alto in The Citations, Yale's graduate a capella group. 
deborah.doroshow@yale.edu

Ziv Eisenberg
Tel Aviv University, B.A; SUNY-Stony Brook, M.A; Yale University, M.A.
Ziv joined Yale after earning a BA in history and political science from Tel Aviv University, and an MA in history from SUNY-Stony Brook. His dissertation, "The Whole Nine Months: Women, Men, and the Making of Middle-Class Pregnancy in Modern America," examines the interrelation of popular and medical perceptions of pregnancy, and the various ways in which they shaped prenatal practice. Broad areas of interest include the history of the US in the 20th century, the family, the human body, health and modern medicine, women's history, and consumerism. . Ziv contributed to Isis and the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and has been a member of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine's steering committee since 2007. Ziv presented his work at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), History of Science Society (HSS), American Studies Association (ASA), and the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine. For the paper he delivered at the 2008 meeting of the New England American Studies Association (NEASA), Ziv had won the Mary Kelley Prize for the best paper presented at the annual conference by a graduate student or non-tenure track scholar.
ziv.eisenberg@yale.edu

Tyler Griffith
University of Chicago, B.A; Warburg Institute, University of London, M.A; University of Edinburgh, M.S.
Originally from Southern Florida, Tyler got his B.A. in Classics and Medieval Studies at the University of Chicago in 2005. The following year he completed an M.A. in Cultural and Intellectual History of the Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, University of London. After teaching history for a year at a community college in rural North Carolina, he completed an MSc in Enlightenment Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and extended his research into the modern era with the MLitt program in Modern Thought at the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen. Tyler's other research interests include topics such as: war and violence in the epic tradition, visual representations of authority, the university and the public sphere, 18th century Latin literature, and contemporary philosophy such as Blanchot and Deleuze.
tyler.griffith@yale.edu

Jed Gross
University of Pennsylvania, B.A; Yale, M.A.
Jed Adam Gross is a native of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, whose manufacturing heritage has been immortalized in the Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans and mourned in Billy Joel's hit song "Allentown." For Jed, however, Eastern Pennsylvania's postindustrial flux provided a happy opportunity to expand his horizons intellectually. In 2002, he earned his B.A. in History and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was inspired by teachers and mentors including Art Caplan, Ivar Berg, and Rosemary Stevens. A joint J.D.-Ph.D. student, Jed is currently Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, & Ethics and has published work in the Quinnipiac Health Law Journal. His scholarly interests include the political economy of science and health policy (e.g., the funding of organ transplants and allocation of organs), scientific and medical evidence in the courtroom, how the common law responds to technological change, and research methods in the biomedical sciences.
jed.gross@yale.edu

Matt Gunterman
Murray State University, B.A.; University of Glasgow, M.Phil; Yale, M.A.
Matt Gunterman's research centers on issues of filth and faith in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current project examines the influences of germ theory on religious practice among Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Topics of interest include the Christian communion ritual, use and design of communion and kiddush cups, evolving ideas of the sanitary and conceptual shifts in sanitary science, patent processes and litigation, religious schism, and commercial applications of germ theory.
matthew.gunterman@yale.edu

Rana Hogarth
Yale, B.A; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, M.H.S.
Rana grew up in sunny Los Angeles, but has lived on the East Coast since 1998 and has come to embrace her new home in spite of the existence of winter and snow. Rana earned her B.A. in History of Science, History of Medicine from Yale in 2002 and she received her M.H.S. in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004. Rana came back to Yale after working in the "real world" as a health policy analyst for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) in Baltimore. Her academic interests include the role of medicine in shaping perceptions of race in ninteenth-century America; race, stigma and disease, and the use of race in public health campaigns and social policies.
When Rana is not pondering issues of race and medicine in America, she is probably watching Monty Python's Flying Circus or eating frites at Rudy's.
rana.hogarth@yale.edu

Kathryn Irving
University of Melbourne, B.S., B.A., M.D.
Kate completed her undergraduate education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She combined a medical degree with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and Bachelor of Medical Science, majoring in American History. Since graduating in 2006, she has been working as a doctor, most recently in Pediatrics at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. She is delighted to have the opportunity at Yale to explore some of her academic interests, which could be broadly summarized as the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Western medicine. Currently, she is pondering how gender and disability influence experiences of health and illness. Like many Australians, Kate has a love for meeting new prople and exploring new places...just don't offer her a Foster's beer!
kathryn.irving@yale.edu

 

Julia Irwin
Oberlin College, B.A.; Yale, M.A.
A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Julia received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Oberlin College in May of 2004. Julia is interested in domestic and international U.S. history, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her academic interests also include the history of public health movements, infectious disease, and the role of medical and biological definitions of race and ethnicity in U.S. cultural and political history. In her dissertation, Julia plans to examine the American Red Cross during World War I and the 1920s. She will use the organization to explore the links between wartime reconstruction and public health initiatives abroad and the widespread interest in international philanthropic involvement at home. Julia hopes this project will shed light on the intersections between public health and disaster relief, U.S. foreign diplomacy and immigration policy, and American national self-definition in the Wilsonian age and beyond.
When she isn't in history mode, Julia loves to cook -- and to eat -- and plays IM softball with the History Department.
julia.f.irwin@yale.edu

Heidi Knoblauch
University of Rochester, B.A.
Heidi Knoblauch graduated from the University of Rochester with a double degree in Health and Society and History. After completing two senior theses (one on the popularization of Einstein's theory of general relativity and the other on imagery opposing universal health care in the United States) she decided to spend a year back in 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters'--New York City--perfecting her latte art. Her current academic interests include the political (micro and macro) effects of the popularization of science and medicine in the United States as well as the use of scientific and medical imagery in corporate advertising and the carry over of this advertising into physicians' waiting rooms.
heidi.knoblauch@yale.edu

Alistair Kwan
University of Auckland M.Sc. (Hons) Dip.Sci.; University of Melbourne M.A. (Hons); Yale M.A., M.Phil.
Alistair Kwan is interested in sciences and associated technologies from Hellenic antiquity to the Enlightenment, mostly to do with the physical world and Aristotelianism, in particular empirical methods and epistemologies of empirical evidence. He treats architecture, instrumentation and physical aspects of books as primary sources, especially to reveal aspects of science that do not get recorded in writing. Most of Alistair's current work focuses on how astronomical observatory architectures reflect research programs from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, and also actively shaped how that research turned out.

Alistair has been a Research Assistant at the yale Center for British Art, a Junior Fellow at the paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a Research Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. At yale, he has taught courses in physics and early modern scientific instrumentation with emphasis on historically rigorous replication.
alistair.kwan@yale.edu

Mary Ellen Leuver
Yale, B.A.
Mary Ellen Leuver graduated from Yale College in 2006, earning her B.A. in History with minors in English and the Humanities. Having moved into the section of History of Science and Medicine for her doctorate, Mary Ellen now looks both ways before exploring the intersections of medicine, public health, and the American city. She is also fascinated by the dynamics of community formation, the history of political movements, and transnational discourses on disease.
Born in Virginia and raised in Colorado Springs, Mary Ellen spent a significant part of each year traveling internationally until she settled in New Haven. She is an aficionado of 1980s and 1990s action and comedy movies, and also devotes copious amounts of time and money to developing her encyclopedic knowledge of New Haven cuisine. In what little spare time she has, Mary Ellen enjoys recreational philosophy, biking, skiing, skydiving, and playing her clarinet.
maryellen.leuver@yale.edu

Brendan Matz
Bowdoin College, B.A.
I'm a 6th year graduate student working on a dissertation that examines the relationship between agricultural animal breeding and the study of heredity in Germany and the United States from approximately 1860 to 1929. Having completed most of my research, I'm in the process of writing my thesis and plan to submit by the fall of 2010. My research and teaching interests include the life sciences and biotechnology, bioethics and the law, food production and consumption, the economy and the environment, and world history. My advisor is Daniel Kevles.
brendan.matz@yale.edu

Kelly O'Donnell
Sarah Lawrence College , B.A.
Kelly, a Philadelphia native, graduated with a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she couldn't decide if her concentration was in science, sociology, or history. After returning from a year of studying the history of science at Oxford, she wrote her senior thesis on the history and sociology of the menstrual cup, a reusable alternative to tampons. Her interests include the history of women's health, medical technologies, alternative medical technologies and practices, and health activism. She is especially fascinated by the history of personal hygiene technologies and philosophies. She also enjoys baking and is an expert pretzel twister.
kelly.odonnell@yale.edu

Joy Rankin
Dartmouth College, B.A.; Duke University, M.A.
Joy is delighted to be pursuing her doctorate at Yale. She graduated from Dartmouth College, where she double-majored in mathematics and history. Her history senior project analyzed Thomas Power's thesis in his book Heisenberg's War that physicist Werner Heisenberg actively sabotaged the Nazi efforts to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. After college, Joy enjoyed a successful career launching educational programs ranging from an online ESL website to online Advanced Placement courses for high school students, a career that brought her from Boston to Portland, Oregon to Durham, North Carolina. Most recently, Joy launched Duke University's doctoral program in Public Policy while attaining her master's degree there. At Duke, Joy investigated the social history of the community at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, as well as the development of open source biology. Her master's thesis employed three documentary works about J. Robert Oppenheimer--a play, a film, and an opera--to examine American attitudes about living in the Atomic Age. At Yale, Joy studies the history of biology, focusing on the post-World War II era in the United States. She is also interested in science education, science policy, and maps of all kinds.
joy.rankin@yale.edu

Thomas Reznick
Colby College, B.A.
Tom came to Yale from New York, by way of Boston and Maine. He spent four years at Colby College, earning a B.A. in Science, Technology and Society, which culminated in his senior scholar's thesis examining the industrialization and scientific management of Northern Maine potato agriculture. After graduating, Tom spent a year in Boston, MA, where he worked for an environmental non-profit. Tom's work at Yale focuses on 19th and 20th century biomedicine and imaging. He is also broadly interested in collecting practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, environmental history, and history of technology. When he's not studying, Tom loves to road bike, cook, play guitar, brew beer, and sing baritone with The Citations, yale's graduate a capella group.
thomas.reznick@yale.edu

Sage Ross
Oklahoma University, B.A.; Yale M.A.
Sage Ross is Sooner born and Sooner bred, having majored in chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. He moved to Connecticut in 2004 with his wife Faith, who is becoming a doctor, and his cats Tesla, Curie,and Halley, who are becoming fat. Although nominally studying history, he styles himself more as a 21st century natural philosopher. His academic interests include physics, chemistry, biology and the spaces in between, as well as science education, science fiction, science writing, and the relationship of science and religion. His favorite proteins are GroES and GroEL.
sage.ross@yale.edu

Rachel Rothschild
Princeton University, B.A.
Rachel received a B.A. in History of Science from Princeton University in 2008, as well as certificates of study in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing. Her senior thesis examined an astronomical theory on climate proposed by a self-educated former janitor, James Croll, which attempted to address ongoing disputes over the cause of the glacial epoch in the late 19th century. Her current academic interests include the history of earth and environmental science in Europe and America, particularly connections between environmental science, public policy and law. After graduation, Rachel worked on international and environmental legal issues with a law firm in Washington, D.C. for energy corporations, foreign embassies and the federal government.

Prior to college, Rachel spent much of her time figure skating, eventually becoming a member of Team USA and winning the senior national championship in synchronized skating in 2004. When she is not studying, you will likely find her tearing up the ice in the 'Yale Whale.'
rachel.rothschild@yale.edu

Robin Scheffler
University of Chicago, B.A.
Robin Wolfe Scheffler has undergraduate degrees in History and Chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge.  His general area of interest is the history of the 20th century (especially interwar) American biological sciences, with an emphasis on the intellectual, institutional, and cultural processes through which a previously scattered series of fields became a (relatively) coherent whole.  He has also worked extensively on the history of interwar science in England, especially at Cambridge.  His work aims to foster an ongoing dialog between the History of Science and Cultural and Intellectual History.
robin.scheffler@yale.edu          

Vreni Schoenenberger
Vanderbilt University, B.S.
Originally from Western New York, Vreni has spent much of her life bouncing around warmer locales before landing once again in the Frozen North. She received a B.S. in Bioethics from Vanderbilt University, where she was an Ingram Scholar. As a result of the field work opportunities the latter provided, she developed a keen interest in the interplay between secretariat-mediated international health NGOs and the localized experience of such work, particularly within the framework of global bioethics. After leaving Vanderbilt, Vreni worked for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health before arriving at Yale. Her research focus remains cemented in the global context, with a proposed dissertation focusing on the historical relationship between United Nations agencies and the nutrition industry. Vreni plans to pursue a career in the international health sector upon completion of her PhD, as she is simultaneously working towards a secondary degree in global health.
vreni.schoenenberger@yale.edu

Paul Shin
Cornell University, B.A
I am an intellectual and cultural historian of early national/early republic US and the Atlantic world, particularly in the intersections between science and medicine ca. 1750-1850. At the moment, I focus on surgery in the US and the ways it shaped the intellectual, epistemological, and cultural milieu of American physicians (who, as I hope to show, often practiced surgery); and more particularly how the 'hand-craft' of surgery was both a positive and negative source of tension in the formation of a 'modern' American medical profession by the mid-19th century--before the rise of physiology and 'experimental' sciences.Closely tied to this project is a meditation on how medical practice (and American culture generally) was shaped by a specific understanding of the 'natural'--as opposed to the 'normal'--a technical term that arose in mid-century Western medical thought. I draw broadly from methods in American Studies, Art History, Narrative medicine, Narrative history, Anthropology, and hope to incorporate visual (portraiture), material (anatomical specimens), and literary sources.

More broadly, I am interested in the dialectic between the 'natural' and 'cultural' in US history. I am also a second/third year medical student, and see my work as part of a larger project of understanding how medical education and medical research shapes professional identity in ways positive and negative.
paul.shin@yale.edu

Richard Sosa
Williams College, B.A.
richard.sosa@yale.edu

Ying Jia Tan
University of California, Berkeley, B.A; Stanford University, M.A.
yingjia.tan@yale.edu

Courtney Thompson
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.
Courtney Thompson graduated from Harvard College in 2009 with an A.B. in History of Science, as well as with a language citation in French and a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her senior thesis project examined both popular and medical photographs of human abnormality, including conjoined twins and limbless individuals, in mid- to late- nineteenth century America. This project aside, her research is primarily focused in the history of psychology and psychiatry in nineteenth and twentieth century America, especially histories of diagnosis and classifications of disease and disorder. Her research occasionally takes her into the fields of media studies, cultural anthropology, and sexuality studies, and her current project, which focuses on representations of AIDS as identity in the digital world, is representative of the interdisciplinary nature of her work.
courtney.thompson@yale.edu

Heather Varughese
Stanford University, B.A.; University of Texas, M.D.
Heather is from Dallas, Texas, but has spent so much time in the Bay Area that she likes to claim California as home, too. She majored in Human Biology at Stanford University, went to medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and completed an internship in internal medicine at Northwestern University. She is studying nineteenth-and twentieth-century American medicine, and is particularly interested in the intersection of medicine and religion in the history of leprosy. Other interests include the development of postgraduate medical education and the history of patient advocacy.
heather.varughese@yale.edu