Sydney Robinson is a first-year doctoral student in the History of Science and Medicine. Her work examines the history of natural history and issues of corporeality as they pertain to nation- and identity-building projects. She is broadly interested in the ways in which (pseudo)scientific frameworks are applied to order the human world on bodily, racial, and national levels. Primarily situated between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, her work often incorporates materiality, visual culture, and museum studies to examine how lines of scientific thought were communicated to and enmeshed within the non-scientific public.
Sydney graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 2021 with a degree in the History of Science. During her time as an undergraduate, she was awarded the Jonathan Hart, Rothschild, and Thomas Temple Hoopes Prizes for her thesis on the cultural pervasiveness of physiognomy, a pseudoscientific practice that reinforced social hierarchies in nineteenth-century American society by lending a scientific veneer to stereotyping.
After spending time working in finance and with a museum design firm, Sydney decided to return to academia. She was fully-funded by the Ertegun Scholarship in the Humanities to pursue an MSc from Oxford’s History of Science, Medicine, and Technology program. In her master’s dissertation, she examined the 1921 hosting of the Second International Congress of Eugenics at the American Museum of Natural History, arguing that the museum put forth a naturalized and nationalized version of eugenics.
Sydney is excited to continue working at the intersection of science and culture at Yale. She is also a recipient of the Dean’s Emerging Scholars Fellowship.