Jesse Olzynko-Gryn, Photocredit: Jonathan Young
Room B22/005
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is Head of the Laboratory for Multimodal History in the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life. 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).
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.
Features and Digital Resources
Projects
Selected Publications
Olszynko-Gryn, Jesse, Anja Suter, Edmund Bolger, and Birgit Nemec (2026). “Learning with Patient Campaigners About a German Drug Scandal.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 49 (1): 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.70014.
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Ellis, Patrick and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (2024). “Communicating Overpopulation to a Global Audience: Disney’s Family Planning (1968).” Journal of Global History 19 (3): 439–462. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022824000068.
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Olszynko-Gryn, Jesse (2023). A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain. Inside Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13917.001.0001.
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Nemec, Birgit and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (2022). “The Duogynon Controversy and Ignorance Production in Post-thalidomide West Germany.” Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online 14: 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbms.2021.09.003.
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Past Events
Reading Group
Biocultural Worlding Reading Group
MOREReading Group
Biocultural Worlding Reading Group
MOREReading Group
Biocultural Worlding Reading Group
MOREReading Group
Multispecies Militarism
MOREWorking Group
Multimodal Appreciation
MOREWorking Group
The World at Their Fingertips: German Teachers and International Encounters in the GDR
MOREFilm Screening
Film Screening: The Land Beneath Our Feet
MOREWorkshop
Living Knowledge: Ethics, Practice, and Community in Multimodal History
MOREPanel Discussion
Panel Discussion: Making Historical Knowledge that Matters
MORETalk
Film as Cure
MORETalk
Oral-History.Digital: Risky Hormones
MORETalk
Conserving Community-based Palestinian Environmental Knowledge
MOREMeeting
The Pharmacologist’s Dilemma: Thalidomide, Abortion, and Medical Ethics in Women’s Healthcare
MOREMeeting
The March: A Prayer from Mining Mountains
MOREMeeting
Between Wonder and Evidence: The International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film
MOREField Trip
Field Trip to Spore
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