Graduate Fellows
A student
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, Postdoctoral Fellow
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 […]
Jason Chernesky, Postdoctoral Fellow
Jason earned his BA in history from Rutgers University-New Brunswick and his MA in history from Rutgers/NIJT-Newark. He recently earned is PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. As a historian of twentieth-century medicine, healthcare, public health, and environments in the United States, Jason’s research examines race-based health disparities […]
Christine Slobogin, Postdoctoral Fellow
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 […]
SJ Zanolini
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
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 […]