The Center’s Director

Ahmed Ragab is a historian, physician, and documentary filmmaker. He studies the history of medicine and public health, medicine, race and colonialism, and postcolonial medicine. He is an associate professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion and Charity (Cambridge UP, 2015), Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam (Routledge, 2018).

Board Member

Laura Stark is a historian and sociologist studying how science work is done under the modern administrative state. Her work has focused on changes in ethics, law, and advocacy in science in a global anticolonial frame. Her emerging work is at the nexus of climate and computing. Stark is invested in social-political theory and supporting resources for public research. She is associate professor at Vanderbilt University.

Board Member

Terence Keel is a professor at UCLA and the Director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies. His research focuses on the social, political, and ethical conditions that produce and abolish societal discrimination. He is the author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science. He directs community-based research project to study overlooked forms of racial discrimination.

Board Member

Soha Bayoumi is a teaching Professor in the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities program at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of the Journal of Middle East Women Studies. Trained in political theory and intellectual history, she studies justice at the intersection of history, political theory, and science, technology, and medicine studies. Her research addresses the questions of health, social justice, and biomedical ethics.

Board Member

Minkah Makalani is an associate professor of history and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on intellectual history, black internationalism, Caribbean independence, political theory, race, and racial identity. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, and co-editor of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem.

Board Member

Lisa Siraganian is a scholar of legal theory and the humanities, American and Anglophone literature, visual art, and film, and professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons, and Modernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life. Her next book is The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots.

Board Member

Myrna Perez is an Associate Professor at Ohio University, jointly appointed in Classics & Religious Studies and in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She studies science and religion, race and science, and sexuality. She is a historian of evolutionary theory, a feminist and critical -race theorist, and a scholar of religion. She is the author of Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy.