Joanna Radin

Joanna Radin is an Associate Professor of History of Medicine at Yale and core member of its Program in History of Science and Medicine. She also holds appointments in History; Anthropology; American Studies; Race Ethnicity and Migration; and Religion and Modernity. She studied Communication at Cornell (BS ‘02, MS ‘04). Before returning to academia for her PhD, completed in History and Sociology of Science at University of Pennsylvania (’12), she worked as a science communication specialist for leading public health and environmental organizations. At Yale she teaches classes in Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical innovation, and the history of global health. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a history of the biobank which was named a “best book” by Nature. With Emma Kowal she edited Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT University Press, 2017), which examines the ethical and political challenges presented by the emergence of practices of freezing across realms of agriculture to endangered species. Her current research involves feminist histories of science fiction and the history of death in fleshy and digital worlds.

Other recent publications:

Joanna Radin “The Unnatural History of Postwar Human Biology” for Worlds of Natural History edited by Nick Jardine, Jim Secord, Emma Spary, and Helen Curry, University of Cambridge Press (in press).

Joanna Radin. “’Digital Natives’: How Medical and Indigenous History Matter for Big Data” Osiris, themed issue on “Histories of Data” (in press)

Susan Lindee and Joanna Radin. (2016) “Patrons of the Human Experience: A History of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,” Current Anthropology, 57(S14): S218-S301.