Graduate Fellows

A student

Yize Hu

by Marian Robbins • March 2, 2023

Yize holds a BSc in chemistry from Nanjing University and an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. For his master’s thesis, he examined the controversies surrounding chemical fertilizer and the emergence of agricultural expertise in modern China. He has also explored the relationship between popular media and the professionalization of biomedical […]


Conor Bean

by Marian Robbins • February 22, 2023

Conor received a BA in Political Science from McGill University in 2015 and an MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2016. His dissertation attempts to develop a concept of ‘affective governance’ in political theory building on Benedict de Spinoza’s notion of multitude and Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics of population. […]


Gregory Smaldone

by Marian Robbins • February 21, 2023

Gregory received his B.S. in Accounting and M.A. in History from SUNY Binghamton. His research studies the intersections of finance capitalism, the experiences of enslaved people in the French Caribbean, and the origins of the French Revolution. Beyond research, Gregory frequently works with non-profit organizations and teaches guest lessons in K-12 classrooms. Contact: gsmaldo2@jhu.edu


Antoine Johnson, Postdoctoral Fellow

by Marian Robbins • February 20, 2023

Dr. Antoine Johnson earned his Ph.D. in the History of Health Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco. His dissertation, “More than Pushing Pills: Black AIDS Activism in the Bay Area, 1981-1996,” explored ways in which Black grassroots organizers confronted HIV/AIDS and structural-medical racism that exposed their communities to infection. His research interests include the […]


Christine Slobogin, Postdoctoral Fellow

by Marian Robbins • February 20, 2023

Christine Slobogin is an art historian of medicine, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 2021. Since then, her research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust ISSF, Yale University’s Paul […]


Heidi Nicholls, Postdoctoral Fellow

by Marian Robbins • September 14, 2022

Dr. Heidi Nicholls is a sociologist of race and U.S. empire. Her book project, Interlocking Erasures: U.S. Empire, Whiteness, and the Terraforming of Politics, demonstrates how racialization reorients politics in ways that reinforce the power of the empire-state. During key periods of settler colonial expansion in Virginia and Hawai’i, settler colonists consistently used Whiteness as a shorthand […]


Pyar Seth

by Jacob Moses • April 7, 2022

Pyar Seth is a PhD Candidate at the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute pursuing a dual degree in Anthropology and Political Science. He is also a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar and a Graduate Fellow to the Black Beyond Data Project. Broadly, Pyar studies the history of Black Atlantic Thought, policing and medicalization, and […]


SJ Zanolini

SJ Zanolini

by Jacob Moses • January 28, 2022

SJ Zanolini is a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with prior graduate degrees in Chinese Literature and Traditional East Asian Medicine. Their dissertation focuses on medicinal discourse about cheap and widely available foods such as porridge, sweet potatoes, and seaweed in early modern China, first as a means of […]


Michele Asuni

by Jacob Moses • January 28, 2022

Michele Asuni is a PhD candidate in the Classics department at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation, titled “Pathos Visible: Color and Emotion from Homer to Heliodorus,” explores how the ancient Greeks used color to characterize emotions across literary genres, media and time periods, with a special focus on issues of materiality, embodiment, and the intersections […]


Michael Healey

Michael Healey

by Jacob Moses • January 22, 2022

Michael Healey received his BA in biology and public health from the University of Rochester in 2016 as part of their early medical scholars program. After matriculating into medical school, he became increasingly interested in health policy and the medical humanities, and eventually decided to take leave to study the history of medicine. Broadly speaking, […]