Graduate Fellows
A student

Gabrielle Robbins, Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Gabrielle Robbins is a historical ethnographer focused on the politics of health, medicine, the body, and the environment in Madagascar. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the new Critical Approaches in Science, Technology, and Medicine (CAST-M) track. In 2023, she earned her PhD from MIT’s Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society. […]

Richard Del Rio, Research Associate
Richard Del Rio is a historian with research interests in the American drug industry, its transformation over time and the societal consequences of those changes. He has joined the Department of the History of Medicine after serving as the Director of Operations at the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy and as a Lecturer […]

Mia Levenson, Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Mia Levenson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines how theatrical and performance cultures produced, proliferated, and circulated biomedical science as well as how these performances contributed to the formation of racial, national, and ethnic identities in the […]

Yize Hu
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 […]