On May 8-9, 2026, members of the third year cohort— Tathagat Bhatia, Ambar Reyes, Linda Ridzuan, Odinaka Kingsley Eze, and Danhue Kim (pictured l-r)— presented their dissertation proposals to the HASTS community.
Each of the soon-to-be PhD candidates delivered short remarks about their intended ethnographic and historical research projects (individual titles listed below) and received constructive feedback from fellow students and faculty alike. During the 2026/27 academic year, the cohort will disperse to field sites and historical archives across the globe, gathering data to refine, and ultimately answer, their research questions.
As always, the third years’ projects showcase the vibrant and interdisciplinary work that HASTS students do. The wider community commends the cohort for their hard work and wishes them success as they embark on the next phase of their degree.
Presentation titles and authors are listed below in the order of their delivery:
Cultures of Repair: Microbial Decomposition across Difference on Jeju Island
Selling a Plutonium-Powered Future: How Nuclear Reprocessing was Made, Unmade, and Made Again
Planetary Paperwork: Data Practices and the Making of Third World Earth Science
From Hustle to Infrastructure: The Making of a Transnational Resale Economy
Biafra: A Story of Science, Technology, and Innovation in Africa
Eighth year PhD candidate Taylor Bailey has curated First-Class Flora: A Stamp Collection of Medicinal Plants, an outdoor exhibition at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Drawing from the large stamp collection of chemical industry market researcher Richard Marston Lawrence (1906-1991), the exhibit poses the question: Why do we collect what we collect?
In its answer to that provocation, First-Class Flora suggests that stamps have served as visual emblems that communicate the history and professional cultures of science. Lawrence’s stamps, for example, bear the images of 220 individual medicinal plants from across the globe, each of which he classed into 26 categories of pharmaceutically useful substances. This kind of schematicity was a key component of Lawrence’s own work in the US chemical industry.
Bailey, who currently serves as Cain Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute, worked with colleagues Jahna Auerbach and Scott Bowe to digitize and install the exhibit. It will be on view until April 2027.
Image courtesy of the Science History Institute
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm (Eastern Time)
On campus: E51-095
Dissertation Committee
Christopher Capozzola
Elting Morison Professor of History
MacVicar Faculty Fellow
Committee Chair
Megan Black
Associate Professor of History
Director of Graduate Studies
Harriet Ritvo
Arthur J Conner Professor of History, Emeritus
Saul Zaritt
Assistant Professor and Program Director of Yiddish
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
Third year HASTS student Tathagat Bhatia has received a research grant from the MIT Center for International Studies. Awarded annually to a small number of students across the Institute, the grants provide funding for PhD candidates whose work focuses on international studies and requires travel for field research and/or visits to archives.
Financial support from CIS will allow Tathagat to advance their dissertation project, tentatively titled “Earthlike: Constituting the planet in the age of postcolonial worldmaking.” After passing their qualifying exams and presenting their dissertation proposal this spring, Tathagat will soon begin intensive, multi-sited archival research for this project.
Sixth year HASTS PhD candidate Zachary La Rock and recent alumna Elena Sobrino PhD ’23 traveled to Philadelphia, PA to present at the University of Pennsylvania’s biennial EnviroLab conference. Taking place between 10 and 11 April, the theme of this year’s convening was “(Un)Doing Catastrophe.” The event drew more than fifty graduate student and early career scholars from across the United States and Canada.
Elena, who is currently a lecturer at the Tufts University STS Program, presented a paper entitled “Fatigue and the Politics of Closure: Testing the Limits of Modernist Crisis Management in the Flint Water Crisis.” Zachary, meanwhile, presented a shortened version of his most recent dissertation chapter, entitled “Curative Malaise: Science, Magic, and Unsettlement in an Agricultural Epidemic.”
In addition to the conference panels and a lively screening of short films, Zachary, Elena, and sixth year HASTS PhD candidate Rustam Khan enjoyed a reunion with eighth year PhD candidate Taylor Bailey, who serves as curatorial fellow at Philadelphia’s Science History Institute as he concludes his dissertation research.
HASTS alumna Michelle Spektor PhD ’23 has been named a 2026 Fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Currently a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, Spektor will use the fellowship to make progress on a project entitled “Making Biometric Citizens: State Power and National Belonging from the British Empire to the Digital Age.” This work builds from her HASTS doctoral research.
The ACLS, which marks its centennial of academic grantmaking in 2026, will award more than 5.3 million dollars in funding to the 63 members of this year’s cohort. Their proposals were selected from a pool of 2,000 applications following lengthy review by leading scholars in their respective fields.
Congratulations, Michelle, on this achievement!
Fourth year HASTS PhD candidate Turner Adornetto and recent program graduate Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25 jointly convened a panel and presented papers at the 2026 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The conference took place in Kansas City, MO between March 25 and 28.
Turner’s and Boyd’s panel was entitled “Technological Environmentalisms: Histories of Environmentalist Technologies and Infrastructures.” In addition to their own presentations on alternative energy infrastructures and biodegradable materials, respectively, the panel featured work by Genevieve Kane of Boston University. Sarah Mittlefehldt, of Northern Michigan University, served as the panel’s chair and discussant.
Fourth year HASTS PhD candidate Turner Adornetto has received a $5000 research grant from the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. The grants program is a component of a Center initiative called “Visualizing Economic Life.”
With the award money, Turner will embark upon the production of a short documentary film about the phenomenon of company-issued currency in West Virginia. He is currently living and working in that area as he completes field- and archival work for his HASTS dissertation project, tentatively titled “Infrastructures of Renewal: Competing Designs for Redevelopment in Central Appalachia.”
Congratulations, Turner!
Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25 received an honorable mention for the 2026 Edward M Coffman First Manuscript Prize, an award from the Society for Military History for best dissertation in that field. The Society notes that the Coffman Prize recognizes “scholars whose work blends military history with social, political, economic and diplomatic history and authors of studies centering on campaigns, leaders, technology, and doctrine.”
Ruamcharoen presented his HASTS dissertation, entitled “Deteriorating Relations: Weatherable Materials, Tropical Decay, and American Power, 1942-1970s,” in summer 2025. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.
Congratulations, Boyd!