Anin Luo

Anin Luo is a doctoral candidate in History of Science at Princeton University interested in historicizing the relationship between politics and understandings of human life. Her dissertation is a postwar international history of “immunity.” Treating living beings’ vulnerability to the environment as both a biological and political problem, it provides a history of how liberal, socialist, and postcolonial scientists, physicians, politicians, legal thinkers, and public health officials used knowledge and practices around immunology to contest claims to health and welfare at international forums like the United Nations and World Health Organization. It thus uses ideas of immunity to bring together the defense of the human body with the security of the “body politic” of the state.

Anin has also explored her historical interest in human life through “the animal”: Her work on animal film in interwar Britain, laboratory animals in Republican China, and legal personhood for animals and environment has appeared or is forthcoming in Isis, East Asian Technology and Society, and Modern Intellectual History.

Anin received her BA in History and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University and her MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She has been a fellow at the Remarque Institute, NYU, and is currently a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow in the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life at the MPIWG.