Jennifer L. Derr

Jennifer L. Derr is an associate professor of history at the UC Santa Cruz, where she also served as the founding director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Her research explores the intersections among medicine, science, the environment, and capitalism, particularly in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Derr’s book, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize.

At Radcliffe, she is writing “The Organ that Traveled the World: Medicine, Capitalism, and the Environmental Body,” which follows the history of liver disease in Egypt and explores what it reveals about the entangled histories of biomedicine, the environment, and capitalism on a global scale.

Derr holds a PhD in history and a BS in biological sciences from Stanford University and an MA from Georgetown University in contemporary Arab studies. Her research has been supported by the American Research Center in Egypt, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Hellman Foundation, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. In 2019, she was awarded the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award to support a research agenda for the project “History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.” In 2021–2023, she directed a Sawyer Seminar titled “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine.”