Visiting Scholars, Current Students, and Alumni

Graduate Program in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

 Visiting Scholars
 Current Graduate Students
 Students Working on Related Projects
 Recent Alumni

Visiting Scholars

• Aaron Moore - specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of modern Japan. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1994, and his Ph.D. in history at Cornell University in 2006. He has held teaching positions at MIT and at Ohio University. He is currently an assistant professor of modern Japanese history at Arizona State University. His book project, Technological Visions of Modernity and Empire in Japan, examines how Japanese technical elites during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) understood technology not simply as advanced machinery and infrastructure, but more broadly as a pervasive system of socio-cultural power and mobilization for building a “New Order” in Japan and its East Asian colonies. At UCLA, he is examining how colonial engineers and technology bureaucrats in China and Manchuria attempted to realize their utopian visions of “constructing Asia” through natural resource studies and development projects during the war. He is also tracing the continuities between Japanese colonial development and the “developmentalism” of post-war Japan with regards to technology.
  
  In the spring, he will teach a course entitled, “Cultures of Technology in Modern Japan,” which examines the relation between technology and society through a consideration of key issues such as eugenics, urban planning and the environment, technology and empire, technology and consumerism, bioethics, post-industrial technological visions, and recent cyborg animation. His other research and teaching interests include Japanese imperialism, and modern Japanese philosophy and political thought, both from a comparative perspective.



• Shigeru Nakayama - was born in Amagasaki, Japan in 1928. He graduated from Hiroshima Higher School in 1948 (physical science major) and from the University of Tokyo in 1951 with an astrophysics major. Since then, his interest shifted to the history of science. He visited the United States as a Fulbright Scholar and received his Ph.D. in the history of science and learning (history of universities) at Harvard in 1959. During his graduate studies, he worked with Thomas Kuhn at Harvard and Joseph Needham at Cambridge and also studied at the Kyoto University Institute of Humanistic Science. After finishing his Ph.D., he participated in the Kyoto University Scientific Mission to Iran Afghanistan and Pakistan.
  
  In 1960, he joined the University of Tokyo and remained there until his retirement. Upon returning to Japan, he focused on East Asian sciences, shifting gradually from the history of traditional East Asian sciences to contemporary science policy studies.
  
  Although most of his publications are in Japanese, amounting to more than thirty books, he has published ten works in English. His work and publications mostly compare Japanese (and also Chinese) science with the Western history of science in which he was trained.


 
• Diane Paul (arriving Winter 2009) - is Professor Emerita in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she directed the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Values. She is also a Research Associate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Prof. Paul received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Brandeis University in 1975. She has been a Visiting Scholar in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, and the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and was recently Visiting Professor in the Program in Ethics and Health at the Harvard Medical School. She has served on the Council and several committees of the History of Science Society and on the NIH Genome I study section.
  
  Her research has focused on historical and policy issues in genetics. She has published in a wide range of journals, including Nature, Scientific American, Genetics, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and the Journal of the History of Ideas. Her books and essays include Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (1995), The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (1998), “From Reproductive Responsibility to Reproductive Autonomy” (2002), “Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics” (2003), “On Drawing Lessons from the History of Eugenics” (2007), and “John Stuart Mill, Innate Differences, and the Regulation of Reproduction” (2008). She is currently working on an NIH-funded project, “A Policy-oriented History of Newborn Screening for PKU” and on a study of the history of scientific and public opinion regarding first-cousin marriage, especially in the United States.

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Current Graduate Students

• Naamah Akavia (email: nakavia at ucla dot edu): how the concept of movement was employed in the theory and practice of psychotherapy in Switzerland and Germany in the beginning of the twentieth century; the motifs of dynamism and motion in the broader intellectual and cultural context, with particular emphasis on the interaction between the discourses of psychiatry and aesthetics


• Lino Camprubi: relations of history of science and political economy in early Francoist Spain, especially the importance of construction engineering for the political economy of the country; the relations between history and philosophy of science


• Daniel Crosby: history of science; mathematics and computing; philosophy; dissertation topic: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and the Mind-Machine Problem, 1950-2000


• Aimee Dowl: early modern Europe and Latin America; history of medicine; scientific knowledge transfer; history of women and gender; indigenous knowledges


• Brad Fidler: the political economy of psychiatric medication especially atypical antipsychotics, psychiatric and epidemiological theory and practice, economic history, and social theory


• Gustavo Garza (email: ggarzaus at ucla dot edu): history of science, 19th to the 20th century; sound studies with a particular focus on the phonograph, development of anthropology as a social science; history of technology; material culture; interaction between scientific knowledge and technologies


• Adam Lawrence (email: aclawrence at ucla dot edu): science, technology, and warfare; Kriegswissenschaft and Wehrwissenschaft; 19th century Germany; interaction between natural and social sciences; evolutionary biology; the history of efficiency


• Lola Martinez: Modern Japan and Korea; Japanese conceptions of racial science; medical practice and public health in colonial Korea; eugenic science and ethnic assimilation policies within the Japanese empire, 1895-1945


• Anindita Nag (email: anag at ucla dot edu): modern South Asia; comparative history of science; production, translation and circulation of scientific knowledge in colonial and postcolonial settings; history of nutrition, famine and disease; biomedical and bureaucratic management of hunger; science and political economy; gender and science; medicine and visual culture


• Daniella Perry (email: dgperry at ucla dot edu): 19th-and 20th- century developments in the life sciences and medical technologies, specifically medical genetics and biotechnologies; science and business, subsequent relations to public policy and public awareness of science and technology, and how these relations affect the direction of science and industry


• Marissa Petrou (mpetrou at ucla dot edu): modern European human sciences, communication through and technology of visual culture; the relationship between the development of anthropology, photography and museums


• Michael Weismeyer (mweismeyer at ucla dot edu): history of science; US science; US history; education; mathematics; physics; modern European science

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Students Working on Projects Related to the History of Science

• Andrea Maestrejuan (email: amaestrejuan at mednet dot ucla dot edu): intellectual property rights, economic history, history of science and technology, history of genetics and genetic technologies, European and German history, oral history

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Recent Alumni

• Alix Hui (2008): Assistant Professor, Mississippi State University
  Dissertation Title: "Hearing Sound as Music: Psychophysical Studies of Sound Sensation and the Music Culture of Germany, 1860-1910"


• Soyoung Suh (2007): Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
  Dissertation Title: "Korean Medicine between the Local and the Universal: 1600-1945"


• Eric Casteel (2007): Visiting Lecturer, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  Dissertation Title: "Entrepot and Backwater: A Cultural History of the Transfer of Medical Knowledge From Leiden to Edinburgh, 1692-1738"


• Courtenay Raia (2006):
  Disseration Title: "The Substance of Things Hoped for: Faith, Science, and Psychial Research in the Victorian fin de siècle"


• Peter Alagona (2006): Assistant Professor, University of California Santa Barbara
  Dissertation Title: "Transforming Conservation: Endangered Species, Biodiversity, and the Political Economy of Science in California"


• Reynal Guillen (2005): Lecturer, California State University Channel Islands
  Disseration Title: "Scientific Colonialism Under an American Technopole: Chicanos/as, Race and Ethnicity"


• Kevin Lambert (2005): Assistant Professor, California State University Fullerton
  Disseration Title: "Mind Over Matter: Language, Mathematics and Electromagnetism in 19th Century Britain"


• Minghui Hu (2004): Assistant Professor, University of California Santa Cruz
  Dissertation Title: "Cosmopolitan Confucianism: China’s Road to Modern Science"


• Gabriel Wolfenstein (2004): IHUM Fellow, Stanford University
  Dissertation Title: "Public numbers and the Victorian State: The General Register Office, the Census, and Statistics in Nineteenth Century Britain"


• Minsoo Kang (2004): Assistant Professor, University of Missouri, St. Louis
  Dissertation Title: "The Automaton: A Historical Study of a Cultural and Intellectual Symbol"


• Avner Ben-Zaken (2004): Junior Fellow, Harvard University
  Dissertation Title: " The Past, the East, and the Circulation of Post-Copernican Astronomy in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660"


• Kathy Nielsen (2002):
  Dissertation Title: "Martial Arts as a Technology in the 20th Century"


• Karen Flint (2001): Associate Professor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  Dissertation Title: "Negotiating Tradition: African Healers, Medical Competition, and Cultural Exchange in South Africa, 1820-1948"


• Karen Oslund (2000): Assistant Professor, Towson University
  Dissertation Title: "Narrating the North: Scientific exploration, technological management, and colonial politics in the North Atlantic Islands (Denmark, Iceland, Scotland)"

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