Sydney Robinson

Sydney Robinson is a doctoral student in the History of Science and Medicine. Her work examines the history of natural history and issues of corporeality as they pertain to nation- and identity-building projects. She is broadly interested in the ways in which (pseudo)scientific frameworks are applied to order the human world on bodily, racial, and national levels. Primarily situated between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, her work often incorporates materiality, visual culture, and museum studies to examine how lines of scientific thought were communicated to and enmeshed within the non-scientific public.

Sydney graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College with a degree in the History of Science. During her time as an undergraduate, she was awarded the Jonathan Hart, Rothschild, and Thomas Temple Hoopes Prizes for her thesis on the cultural pervasiveness of physiognomy, a pseudoscientific practice that reinforced social hierarchies in nineteenth-century New York City by lending a scientific veneer to stereotyping.

After spending time working in finance and at a museum design firm, Sydney returned to academia through the generous funding of the Ertegun Scholarship, graduating with distinction from Oxford’s History of Science, Medicine, and Technology master’s program. In her master’s dissertation, she examined the 1921 hosting of the Second International Congress of Eugenics at the American Museum of Natural History, arguing that the museum put forth a particularly naturalized and nationalized version of eugenics.

At Yale, Sydney was selected as a Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration Fellow and a Dean’s Emerging Scholar. She welcomes questions from prospective applicants with similar interests.