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!
During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) this past January, third year HASTS student Odinaka Kingsley Eze offered a workshop series entitled “Design through Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism.” A collaboration with Eze’s colleague Sheila Bombaar (University of Texas, Austin), the hybrid activity exposed MIT undergraduates to how Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism can serve as design frameworks for creativity and speculative imagination in the 21st century. MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society sponsored the initiative.
From January 14th to 16th, Eze and Bombaar guided students through a series of exercises that allowed them to develop conceptual projects, prototypes, and visual ideas that fused historical imagination with future-oriented design. In doing so, the instructors encouraged participants to incorporate principles of pan-African solidarity and Afro-futuristic systems of knowledge— such as oral traditions, folklore, poetry, and African cosmologies— into their work. The result was a series of projects that proposed to re-invigorate creative industries spanning from game design to fashion by suffusing them with these frameworks.
First year HASTS student Jorge Palacios, a mixed-media scholar-artist who holds an MFA in environmental art and practice from the University of California, Santa Cruz, is featured in two upcoming gallery exhibitions taking place in Chattanooga, TN and Kansas City, MO, respectively.
From January 31st to March 7th, Jorge’s work will be on display at the 100,000,000 Gallery in an exhibition entitled “Bone Snack.” According to the curators, the artwork featured in the Kanas City-based exhibition represents “intensity and narrative in both concept and process.” Jorge’s submission was one of 36 selected from a pool of 140 artists.
From February 27th to June 6th, meanwhile, Jorge’s artwork will be on display at Stove Works in Chattanooga. The curators of that exhibition, entitled “Paradise,” write that the artworks featured challenge normative ideas about the future, offering “a queer reading of paradise that presents the idyllic as an endless possibility.”
To learn more about Jorge’s artistic practice, visit their website at jorgx.com.
Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25 has been awarded the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Bernard S Finn IEEE History Prize. Given annually to the best paper in the history of electrotechnology, the prize recognizes Ruamcharoen’s article “Tropicalizing the Portable Radio: Electronics and the US Military’s Battle against Fungi in the Pacific War.” The article appeared in the April 2024 issue of Technology and Culture.
Ruamcharoen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. The HASTS community congratulates him on this wonderful achievement.