Alumni - MIT HASTS

Originally called History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HSSST), and renamed to History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) in 2004, the program has granted 112 doctoral degrees since its inception in 1988. HASTS alumni bring deep intellectual curiosity to their professional lives—whether they are serving in academic positions or making their mark at a public agency or private corporation. Read more about what our alumni are doing after graduation in the News and Alumni Books sections of this website.

Ashawari Chaudhuri

Dissertation: The Kernel of Doubt: Agricultural Biotechnology, Braided Temporalities, and Agrarian Environments in India

Advisor: Michael M.J. Fischer

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation: Cornell University

Clare Kim

Dissertation: The Subjects of Modernism: Mathematics, Art, and the Politics of Value in Twentieth-Century United States

Advisor: David Kaiser

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation: University of Illinois Chicago

Grace Kim-Butler

Dissertation: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technoscientific Re-Enchantment: Recasting Light, Colloids, and Microbes for Art and Heritage Conservation in U.S. and Italian Laboratories

Advisor: Stefan Helmreich

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation: Utrecht University

Alison Laurence

Dissertation: Afterlives of Extinction: The Politics of Display in the Modern United States

Advisor: Harriet Ritvo

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation:

Lucas Mueller

Dissertation: Toxic Relationships: Health and the Politics of Science and Trade in the Postcolonial World

Advisor: Harriet Ritvo

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation: University of Geneva

Burcu Mutlu

Dissertation: Transnational Biopolitics and Family-Making in Secrecy: An Ethnography of Reproductive Travel from Turkey to Northern Cyprus

Advisor: Heather Paxson

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation: Ozyegin University

Peter Oviatt

Dissertation: Truffle Crops and Soil Drugs: New Fungal Practices and Epistemologies for the 21st Century

Advisor: Heather Paxson

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation:

Beth Semel

Dissertation: Speech, Signal, Symptom: Machine Listening and the Remaking of Psychiatric Assessment

Advisor: Graham Jones

Degree Awarded: 2019

Current Affiliation: Princeton University

Nicole Labruto

Dissertation: The Plantation Network: Brazilian Bioenergy Science and Sustainability in the Global South

Advisor: Stefan Helmreich

Degree Awarded: 2018

Current Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University

Ryan Shapiro

Dissertation: Bodies at War: National Security in American Controversies over Animal & Human Experimentation from WWI to the War on Terror

Advisor: Harriet Ritvo

Degree Awarded: 2018

Current Affiliation: Property of the People

Renée Blackburn

Dissertation: Highway Madness!: Politics and Citizen Participation in Postwar US Traffic Safety Technology and Policy

Advisor: Merritt Roe Smith

Degree Awarded: 2017

Current Affiliation: US DOT Volpe Center

Marie Burks

Dissertation: Meditations in an Emergency: Social Scientists and the Problem of Conflict in Cold War America

Advisor: Christopher Capozzola

Degree Awarded: 2017

Current Affiliation:

Amy Johnson

Dissertation: Twitter and the Body Parodic: Global Acts of Re-creation and Recreation

Advisor: Graham Jones

Degree Awarded: 2017

Current Affiliation: Harvard University

Hilary Robinson

Dissertation: Making a Digital Working Class: Uber Drivers in Boston, 2016-2017

Advisor: Susan Silbey

Degree Awarded: 2017

Current Affiliation: Northeastern University

Shira Shmuely

Dissertation: The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Vivisection and the Question of Animal Pain in Britain, 1876-1912

Advisor: Harriet Ritvo

Degree Awarded: 2017

Current Affiliation: Tel Aviv University

Anna Wexler

Dissertation: Sparking Controversy: The Contested Use of Noninvasive Brain Stimulation

Advisor: Susan Silbey

Degree Awarded: 2017

Current Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania

Amah Edoh

Dissertation: Doing Dutch Wax Cloth: Practice, Politics, and "The New Africa"

Advisor: Christine Walley

Degree Awarded: 2016

Current Affiliation:

Lan Li

Dissertation: Intimate Cartographies: Body Maps and the Epistemic Encounter in China and Britain, 1893-1985

Advisor: Emma Tang

Degree Awarded: 2016

Current Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Shreeharsh Kelkar

Dissertation: Platformizing Higher Education: Computer Science and the Making of MOOC Infrastructure

Advisor: Graham Jones

Degree Awarded: 2016

Current Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley / personal page

Canay Özden-Schilling

Dissertation: Economy Electric: Techno-Economics, Neoliberalism, and Electricity in the United States

Advisor: Michael M.J. Fischer

Degree Awarded: 2016

Current Affiliation: National University of Singapore

Tom Özden-Schilling

Dissertation: Salvage Cartographies: Mapping, Futures, and Landscapes in Northwest British Columbia

Advisor: Michael M.J. Fischer

Degree Awarded: 2016

Current Affiliation: National University of Singapore

Pages: 1234567

*Alumni with an asterisk (*) next to their name received a degree from another MIT PhD program, but were advised or co-advised by STS faculty members before the HSSST graduate program was created.

PEOPLE | Alumni