The Future of Health

Keith Wailoo, Ph.D.

Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs 

Princeton University 

Keith Wailoo, Ph.D., is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is jointly appointed in the Department of History and in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and is the current President of the American Association for the History of Medicine (2020–2022). In 2021 he received the Dan David Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Wailoo’s research straddles history and health policy, touching on drugs and drug policy, on the interplay of identity, ethnicity, gender and medicine, and on the controversies in genetics and society. His published writings have advanced historical and public understanding on a range of topics: racial disparities in health care, the cultural politics of pain and opioids, how pandemics change societies, and the FDA’s decision to ban menthol cigarettes. Dr. Wailoo has authored several books including: Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (2000), Pain: A Political History (2014) and his most recent: Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (2021). 

Ashanté Reese, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies 

University of Texas at Austin; Visiting Scholar at Wesleyan University 

Ashanté Reese, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Broadly speaking, Dr. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces despite anti-Blackness. Her first book Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (2019), takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of anti-Blackness and food access. Black Food Geographies won the 2020 Best Monograph Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the 2020 Margaret Mead Award jointly awarded by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her second book, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (2020), is a collection co-edited with Hanna Garth that explores the geographic, social, and cultural dimensions of food in Black life across the U.S.

Zaira Simone-Thompson, Ph.D.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies 

Wesleyan University 

Zaira Simone-Thompson, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Wesleyan University and holds a Ph.D. in Geography from The Graduate Center at CUNY. Her dissertation, “A Discursive Geography of Repair: Exploring Regional and National Claims for Reparative Justice in the Caribbean,” examines the symbolic and material forces of reparative claims in Barbados. Her current work and teaching centers on contemporary experiences and representations of slavery, indentureship, and uneven development in the Caribbean. 

Nayan Shah, Ph.D.

Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History 

University of Southern California 

Nayan Shah, Ph.D., is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. Dr. Shah is a historian whose research uncovers how people struggle with illness, migration, and incarceration in the United States and across the globe from the nineteenth century to the present. He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the van Humboldt Foundation and the Freeman Foundation. His books—including Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (2001), Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (2012), and Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (2022)— have meaningfully transformed intellectual debates about the relationship between public health, the law, and social difference.

Hil Malatino, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 

Pennsylvania State University 

Hil Malatino, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is also a research associate at the Rock Ethics Institute. Dr. Malatino’s research and teaching draws upon trans and intersex studies, critical sexuality studies, transnational feminisms, disability studies, and medical ethics to theorize how experiences of violence, trauma, and resilience play out in intersex, trans, and gender non-conforming lives. His current work places decolonial feminist thought, affect theory, and trans studies in dialogue to investigate the investment of popular and scholarly accounts of gender transition in neo-colonial understandings of gendered embodiment. His published books include Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (2019), Trans Care (2020, a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award), and Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (2022).

Rene Almeling, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Sociology 

Yale University 

Rene Almeling, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, with courtesy appointments in American Studies, the School of Public Health, and the School of Medicine. Dr. Almeling is a sociologist whose research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is the recipient of the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize, one of Yale University’s highest honors for Outstanding Scholarly Research.  She is the author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (2011) and GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health (2020), which examine questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, medical markets, and individual experiences.