Current STS Graduate Students
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 Lisa Avron laa222@cornell.edu |
Lisa's research explores the politics of climate change predictions, examining what happens when global knowledge about environmental futures touches down into our political-economic present. Her current project, funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, uses ethnography and archival work to examine her hometown of South Florida, an area forecasted to be particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise and increased storm intensity, analyzing issues of systemic inequality that climate predictions make visible, like the rise of “climate gentrification” in Black, Brown, and immigrant communities. She was recently a Predoctoral Fellow with Hobart and William Smith Colleges through the Fisher Center for Gender and Justice (2019 - 2020). Lisa really enjoys teaching and the community created by social justice activism. |
 Amy Cheatle ac2288@cornell.edu |
Amy's work attends to new communities of craft, computation, and robotics, where collaborative and creative endeavors drive (extra)ordinary forms of work. Her ethnographic research has explored human-robot interactions within fine art furniture studios and operating rooms, giving shape to the ways in which sensual, tacit, and embodied forms of knowledge recalibrate and extend through new computational endeavors. |
 Shoan Yin Cheung sc479@cornell.edu |
Shoan Yin's research examines the global uptake of reproductive technologies through the case of the birth control pill's late introduction to Japan in 1999. Her fieldwork, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (2017) and Toshiba International Foundation (2017), uses ethnographic methods at the intersection of STS and East Asian medical humanities. She completed advanced Japanese training at Stanford's 10-month program at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama on a Nippon Foundation Fellowship (2016-2017), and previously attended Columbia's Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (2012); she is also proficient in Chinese and French. |
 Cat Coyle cmc569@cornell.edu |
Cat is a Ph.D. student who works at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and the history of technology. Her research interests include the historical and material study of media and media transmission, and utilizes the techniques of media archaeology. She is interested in the study of failed, broken, and fossilized media technologies and phenomena. Cat received a B.A. in English from Saint Joseph’s University and an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. |
 Shoshana Deutsh smd338@cornell.edu |
Shoshana's areas of interest are: Illness subjectivities of healthcare professionals; mental health and trauma; prevention and risk; anthropology of the body and bodily knowledges; nursing education, expertise and practices; medical training and professional knowledges; epistemologies of care; institutional ethnography; sensory studies; feminist science studies. |
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Amanda's current project is a critical analysis of (bio) archaeologists' work and (bio) archaeological practices. She is interested in notions of the body, issues of gender and race, heritage and museum practices. Additional research interests include animal, postcolonial, and feminist studies, and critical race theory. |
 Mehmet Ekinci me332@cornell.edu |
Mehmet's interests include: Sociology and anthropology of science-technology; laboratory studies; intellectual histories of life sciences, biomedicine, biotechnology and bioinformatics; social and critical theory; economics of science; new institutionalism; public engagement with science; science journalism; science fiction and STS. |
 Tien Dung Ha dvh27@cornell.edu |
Dung's areas of interest are: Social studies of biomedicine; history of medicine; race, ethnicity, science, and colonialism; transnational science; data and evaluation studies; southeast Asian studies. |
 Rebecca Harrison rah288@cornell.edu |
Becca's research considers how agricultural biotechnologists are deliberate, ethical actors navigating both a complex regulatory structure and increasing public concern about genetic engineering. Specifically, she focuses on academic scientists at land-grant institutions (like Cornell), and is using tools from STS to imagine a more reflective type of public engagement around technology development. |
Jiuheng He jh2666@cornell.edu |
Jiuheng's interests include: Emerging technology; social construction of technology; artificial intelligence; social media; scientism and modernization of China; sociology of scientific knowledge. |
Christopher Hesselbein clh268@cornell.edu |
Christopher's research interests are: Social construction of technology; body studies; fashion studies; material culture studies; embodiment, comportment, and movement, aesthetics of technology; technique, skill, and tacit knowledge; digital technologies and search engine optimization; digital aesthetics and the senses. |
 Wanheng Hu wh429@cornell.edu |
Wanheng's areas of interest are: Scientism and technocracy; artificial intelligence (AI), especially its application in medicine and healthcare; the sociology of knowledge and expertise, in particular on issues of credibility; the sociology of technology; science and the public; development studies and modernization, in particular agricultural modernization; the social history of science in modern China. |
 Barkha Kagliwal bsk76@cornell.edu |
Barkha's dissertation is tentatively titled, "Understanding Processing: Food and Technoscience in India". One solution to the problem of food wastage in India could be processing, the thesis analyzes how processing technologies are shaping the food system. Using the case of Mega Food Parks, it illuminates interactions between food processing technologies, infrastructures and national policy design in changing the agri-food sector. Keywords: Sociology of technology; economic sociology; market sociology; food studies; food quality; Indian food system; food processing technologies. |
 Faridah Laffan fel23@cornell.edu |
Faridah's areas of interest include: 19th century archaeology; Victorian "Assyriomania"; interactions between imperialists and custodians of local knowledge in Ottoman empire; roles of race, gender, class, and religion in crystallization of Assyriology; 19th century museum practices. |
 Lisa Lehner ll723@cornell.edu |
A PhD-Candidate at the department, Lisa is currently pursuing an ethnography about the effects of new Hepatitis C antiviral drugs on sufferers' illness experience and care practices in the context of welfare-state public health in Austria. Her research sits at the intersection of science & technology studies, medical anthropology, political science, and critical public health. In her work, she uses interdisciplinary approaches to highlight structural vulnerabilities and the downstream effects of pharmaceutical, biomedical, and public health measures, in particular on marginalized social groups. In general, she tends to think that we need to find better ways to live with viruses and viral infectivity. View her website |
 Lissette Lorenz ldl54@cornell.edu |
Lissette's research is on the social impacts of nuclear disasters with a focus on Japanese and American experiences from WWII to post-Fukushima. |
 Jason Ludwig jdl328@cornell.edu |
Jason is a PhD student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies. His research interests converge around race and health, slow disaster, and possibilities for a radical politics of science and technology. In 2019, he was a research assistant on "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River," an arts and research collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. He has co-organized Anthropocene Field Campuses in St. Louis, Missouri and New Orleans, Louisiana with Kim Fortun, Scott Knowles and Tim Schütz. |
 Jeffrey Mathias jm2499@cornell.edu |
Jeffrey's areas of interest include: History of science, technology, and media; history of the human sciences; media theory; history of cybernetics; science and religion; 20th century US. Dissertation: “Pathologies of Boredom”: Isolation and the Cold War Human Sciences. View his website |
Donny Persaud dhp75@cornell.edu |
Donny's research areas are: Infrastructure studies; repair and maintenance; rural studies; geographies of emerging technologies. |
Ranjit Singh rps244@cornell.edu |
Ranjit's current research focuses on conceptualization, implementation, and deployment of India's biometrics-based identity infrastructure, Aadhaar. Other interests include sociology and history of technology (with a focus on information technology); infrastructure studies; relationship between law and STS; history of statistical thinking and practices of counting; ethnomethodology; biometrics and identity politics; history of STS; and politics of expertise and knowledge. View his website |
Sahar Tavakoli st696@cornell.edu |
Sahar's areas of interest include: Material culture studies, performativity, sociology of medicine and medical technology, identity and gender in relation to clinical technologies/spaces/practices, commonplace/invisible/mundane artifacts in technological spaces. |
Yue Zhao |
Yue's research interests include: history of AI and computing, particularly the history of facial detection; technologies and the self; body studies; STS in China; media archeology; algorithmic culture; material culture; visual culture. View Yue's website |
