Nayanika Ghosh

Nayanika recently completed her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University, where she specialized in feminist science and technology studies, the history and politics of modern biology, the history of scientific racism, and science and social movements, particularly in the twentieth-century United States. She previously trained in social anthropology and the philosophy of biology. She is currently working on her first monograph, tentatively titled, Genes and the Left: Sociobiology and the Backlash Against Radical Science. Genes and the Left brings interdisciplinary scholarship on the nature-nurture debate in conversation with the histories of higher education, the New Left, and the Cold War. Specifically, it examines the suppression of “radical science” in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s by expanding the archive of a scientific controversy called “the sociobiology debate.” She has published journal articles and book chapters on science and gender, race and genomics, and the reception of biological determinism in the U.S. academy after the Second World War. Her work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Science History Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the departments of the history of science, and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Harvard University.