Jonathan Kuo
History ◦ Writing ◦ Medicine
I am an MD/PhD student in the History of Medicine in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Johns Hopkins University currently in my second year of medical school.
My academic work focuses on the history of health activism across the political spectrum in the twentieth-century Anglosphere and its global connections. I am especially interested in how activist groups build coalitions despite differences in race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and belief and in the promises and perils of political change based on fluid markers of identity.
In addition to the history of medicine and the health humanities, my research interests are informed by scholarship from queer theory, critical race studies, science and technology studies, comparative-historical sociology, digital humanities and computational history, and rhetoric and media studies.
My first area of research examines the history of exemptions to vaccine mandates. My first paper studied the legal and social history of the personal belief exemption to vaccination in California state law as a case study of the origins of these exemptions across the United States. My undergraduate honors thesis explored the origins of exemptions in the Progressive Era, with a particular focus on the rhetorical value of exemption language at the time.
My second area of research examines the early history of HIV/AIDS activism in the UK. My master’s thesis studied efforts to incorporate racial categories in early HIV/AIDS work, both in public health programs initiated by the UK government and community support networks established in a handful of cities outside of London. I am actively conducting archival research and research interviews for this project and hope to expand components of it to a digital humanities oral history archive in the future.
I welcome inquiries from anyone interested in learning more about combining medicine and history or in my work. I actively mentor several students applying to or considering MD/PhD programs in the humanities and would be happy to offer advice about pursuing MD/PhDs in nontraditional fields. Please feel free to reach out!
Education
Johns Hopkins University
MD/PhD, History of Medicine, School of Medicine and Department of the History of Medicine, anticipated 2032.
Supported by a National Institute of General Medical Sciences T32 Medical Scientist Training Program Grant.
University of Manchester, UK
MSc with Distinction, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), 2023.
Supported by a Marshall Scholarship.
University of California, Berkeley
BA with Honors, Rhetoric, 2022.
BA, Molecular and Cell Biology, 2022.