Jennifer L. Derr

Jennifer L. Derr is an associate professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also served as the founding director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (2019–2024) and as the primary principal investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the theme of “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine.” Jennifer Derr’s research explores the intersections among the histories of medicine, science, the environment, and capitalism in the modern Middle East and North Africa. She holds a PhD in history, as well as a BS in biological sciences from Stanford University and an MA from Georgetown University in contemporary Arab studies.  

Her first book, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford UP, 2019), chronicles the transformation of the Nile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to support a colonial economy in Egypt, and the significance of the river’s new materiality in producing knowledge forms, configurations of capital, practices of authority, and embodied subjectivities. It was the winner of the 2020 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. 

Professor Derr’s second manuscript, provisionally entitled The Organ that Traveled the World: Medicine, Capitalism, and the Environmental Body, traces the production of the liver as a site of knowledge, disease, and treatment in twentieth century Egypt and the significance of this history within that of biomedicine and public health in the Global South during the second half of the twentieth century. In the second half of the twentieth century, liver disease ranked among the leading causes of death in Egypt due to the prevalence of a constellation of diseases — hepatitis C primary among them — that target the organ. Her research has been supported by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2024–2025), the National Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hellman Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2019, she was awarded the National Science Foundation’s five-year CAREER grant to support a broad research agenda focused on the “History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.”