The Joint Atlantic Seminar series offers the opportunity for graduate students in the history of the life sciences to present their work to a well-informed audience in an informal and encouraging setting. JAS-Bio has fostered a long tradition of collegiality amongst historians of biology along the eastern seaboard including the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada. It is one of the nicest ways to present an early career paper and meet other participants in the field.

There will be no hybrid or online access to this meeting. JAS-Bio meetings are held in person.

Registration is free for students and $30 for full-time faculty. You can register here.

 

Preliminary Program

The 60th Annual
Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology
April 10-11 2026

Hosted by
Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Johns Hopkins University 

Friday, April 10

5:00–7:00 pm — Snack and Drinks (Gilman Atrium)

7:00 pm onward — Dinner, drinks, and socializing
(Participants are invited to make their own dinner plans.)

Saturday, April 11
All sessions will take place in Gilman 50.

8:00–9:00 am — Buffet Breakfast (Gilman 300)

9:00–10:30 am — Session I: History from Below the Lab, Clinic, and Factory

  • Jessica Leigh Hester (History, Johns Hopkins University), “His muse, his assistant, his masseuse, everything”: Hermine Schmidt, Widow Anatomist
  • Sofia Grant (History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University) Perfect Barometers: Experiential Knowledge and Experimental Precision in Dr. Joseph Hollander’s Climate-Controlled Rheumatoid Arthritis Studies, 1953-1968
  • Anthony Liddie (History of Science and Medicine, Yale University) “This Black Sh*t Never Left Me”

10:30–11:00 am — Coffee Break

11:00 am–12:30 pm — Session II: Food, Sex, and Labor

  • Hailey Davis (History of Science and Medicine, Yale University), “Private Birth Among Lovers”: Reproducing Heteropatriarchal Expertise in the Movement for Unassisted Childbirth
  • Zi Yun Huang (Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago), Feeding a Hungry World, One Bucket of Plankton at a Time (1920s-1950s)
  • Yağmur Metin (History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Indiana University Bloomington), The Role of the Journal Genetics and the Genetics Society of America in Ensuring the Survival of Genetics as a Discipline

12:30–2:00 pm — Boxed Lunch (Gilman 300)

2:00–3:30 pm — Session III: Field Notes from Far and Wide

  • Clara Luce (History, Rice University), The Training of the Human Plant: Bioprospecting and the Eugenic Theories of Luther Burbank
  • Shiyi Xiang (History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University), Learning from the Field: Scientists and Rubber Cultivation in Socialist China
  • Zeynep Kuleli (History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University), Inherent Dispositions and Artificial Selection in Early Modern Ottoman Floriculture

3:30–4:00 pm — Coffee Break

4:00–6:00 pm — Session IV: Revising Narratives of Genes and Germs

  • Andrew Kishuni (History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University), The Shape of Things to Come: Biological Weapons Policy and the Origins of Existential Risk in the Interwar United States
  • Amalia Sweet (History of Science, Harvard University), “Frightening Possibilities for Tinkering with Life”: Denaturation, Hybridization, and the Technical Foundation of Molecular Biology
  • Leigh Alon (History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University), Jewish Power and Jewish Disease: The Story of Tay Sachs in 1970s Philadelphia
  • Vidhyasai Annem (Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine), “Bacteriology in Bombay: The Early Years of the Bombay Bacteriological Laboratory

6:00–6:30 pm — Break

6:30–8:30 pm — Banquet (Ambassador Dining Room)


 



 


 


 

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The 60th JAS-Bio meeting will be held in Gilman Hall on Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, April 10-11, 2026. 

This year's organizers are:

  • Nathaniel Comfort, Professor of the History of Medicine (comfort@jhmi.edu)
  • Lijing Jiang, Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology (ljiang@jhu.edu)
  • Leigh Alon, PhD candidate in the History of Medicine (lalon2@jhmi.edu)
  • Zeynep Kuleli, PhD candidate in the History of Science and Technology (zkuleli1@jhu.edu)

Group Conveners

Nathaniel Comfort

I am interested in heredity and health in twentieth century America. My recent book project examined the growth and evolution of medical genetics from the early days of Mendelism to the Human Genome Project. In it, I show that heredity, health, and human improvement have always been intermingled; there was no break when medical genetics became “legitimate.” The professionalization of medical genetics that began around mid-century involved many refinements of the message, but the old goals of human improvement dating back to Francis Galton carry down to present-day efforts such as gene therapy. Likewise, trendy contemporary notions of individualism and personalized medicine have roots back in the late nineteenth century, with Archibald Garrod’s emphasis on diathesis and biochemical individuality. I strenuously avoid labeling one of these good and the other bad; these twin impulses resonate with and feed off of one another, and both have inspiring and sobering implications for how we think about health and identity today.

 

Lijing Jiang

I am a historian of modern life sciences, often finding myself probing the question how epistemic and cultural interpretations and material manipulations of organisms or objects shaped varied processes of knowledge production in biology and biotechnology. I started my major inquiries with a PhD dissertation on the history of cell death and aging research and am currently working on a monograph about how ornamental fish functioned as model organisms in twentieth-century East Asia and North America. 

 

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