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Jennifer L. Derr University of California, Santa Cruz |
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Bio: Jennifer L. Derr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she is also the Founding Director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in History and a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and a M.A. from Georgetown University in Contemporary Arab Studies. Professor Derr’s research explores the intersections among medicine, science, the environment, and political economy in the modern Middle East. Her 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 colonial economy in Egypt, and the significance of the river’s new material environment in producing knowledge forms, configurations of capital, practices of authority, and embodied subjectivities. Professor Derr’s second manuscript, provisionally entitled The Liver in Egypt: Productions of an Organ Through 20th-Century Public Health and Political Economy, traces the production of the liver as a site of knowledge, disease, and treatment in 20th-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. Her research has been supported by the 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 5-year CAREER grant to support a broad research agenda focused on the “History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.” |
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