Joanna Radin
Joanna Radin received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the social and technical conditions of possibility for the systems of biomedicine and biotechnology that we live with today. She has particular interests in global histories of biology, ecology, medicine, technology, and anthropology since 1945; history and anthropology of life and death; biomedical technology and computing; feminist, indigenous, and queer STS; and science fiction.
She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017), the first history of the low-temperature biobank and co-editor, with Emma Kowal of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017), which considers the technics and ethics of freezing across the life and environmental sciences.
Selected Publications:
- Joanna Radin. “Latent Life: Concepts and Practices of Tissue Preservation in the International Biological Program.” Forthcoming (2013) in Social Studies of Science as part of special issue, “Indigenous Body Parts, Mutating Temporalities, and the Half-Lives of Postcolonial Technoscience,” co-edited with Emma Kowal and Amy Hinterberger.
- “Studying Mandela’s children: human biology in post-Apartheid South Africa” An interview with Noel Cameron, by Joanna Radin. (2012) For special issue, “The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles and International Networks” Current Anthropology, 53 (S5).
- Sarah Kaplan & Joanna Radin. (2011) “Bounding an Emerging Technology: Deconstructing the Drexler-Smalley Debate about Nanotechnology.” Social Studies of Science. 41(4) 457–485. (authors listed alphabetically).
- Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal. (2015) “Indigenous Blood and Ethical Regimes in the United States and Australia Since the 1960s.” American Ethnologist, 42(4): 749-765.
- Joanna Radin. (2015) “Planned Hindsight: The Vital Valuations of Frozen Tissue at the Zoo and Natural History Museum” Journal of Cultural Economy. DOI: ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2015.1039458
- Joanna Radin (2014) “Unfolding Epidemiological Stories: How the WHO Made Frozen Blood into a Flexible Resource for the Future,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part C, 47: 62-73
- Joanna Radin. (2014) “Collecting Human Subjects,” part of special issue, “Archiving Anthropos: The Ethics of Collections in History and Anthropology,” Curator 57(2), co-edited with Ann Kakaliouras
Education:
B.S., Cornell University, 2002
M.S., Cornell University, 2004
MAST OTHER, University of Pennsylvania, 2007
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2012
