Thomas Anderson

Thomas C. Anderson is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in History of Science and Medicine (HSHM) and Early Modern Studies at Yale University who examines the history of poisons, the environment, and human experimentation in the Francophone Caribbean. He is primarily interested in how experiments with poisons interacted with colonial anxieties as well as the invention of anatomically-based racial categories to help produce emergent notions of climatic determinism that would continue to develop through the nineteenth century. Thomas pays special attention to how enslaved and indigenous peoples’ knowledge of the natural world fundamentally impacted histories of colonialism, slavery, and habitation in the Caribbean.

He has previously written on the poisonous manchineel tree in Guadeloupe and the production of racially-inflected ecological knowledge, as well as on early modern scientific travel. Thomas received a Bachelor of Arts with honors in History and French and Francophone Studies from Hamilton College.