Jesse Olszynko-Gryn

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is Head of the Laboratory for Oral History and Experimental Media in Department II. His research converges on the history of reproduction, technology, and communication in Britain and the United States since around 1900.

He is the author of the book, A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain (MIT Press, 2023), as well as articles and chapters on time-lapse cinematography, science fiction cinema, feminist health activism, and contraceptive technologies. He has co-edited two special issues: "Reproduction on Film" (British Journal for the History of Science, 2017) and "Reproductive Politics in Twentieth-Century France and Britain" (Medical History, 2019). His current project is a collaboration with patient groups and other partners to explore how diverse, self-assembled communities have produced, communicated, and challenged biomedical, demographic, and other kinds of reproductive knowledge.

Olszynko-Gryn received his doctorate in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He subsequently held positions as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, where he remains an affiliated scholar, and as a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He has worked as a visiting scholar in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, a visiting fellow at the French Institute for Advanced Studies in Lyon, and a visiting lecturer at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University.