Ayah Nuriddin, MLS, PhD

Ayah Nuriddin is Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine. She is a historian of medicine and biology with particular interests in the histories of eugenics, racial science, scientific racism, reproduction, and human subjects research.

Nuriddin is currently at work on her first book tentatively entitled “Seed and Soil: Black Eugenic Thought in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” It examines how African Americans navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism in relation to struggles for racial justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also analyzes the complex and often paradoxical ways that African Americans imagined the utility of racial science and eugenics for challenging scientific racism and advocating for racial equality. It will also trace how the ongoing legacies of racial science continue to shape African American articulations of racial formation and health disparities.

Nuriddin’s research has been supported by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM) and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI) at Johns Hopkins University. She was an inaugural inductee of the Johns Hopkins University chapter of the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. Her work has been published in Historical Studies of Natural Science, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and the Lancet. She has appeared on the Disability History Association podcast and American History TV on C-Span.

Prior to arriving at Yale, she was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and African American Studies at Princeton University. She received her PhD in the History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins University. She also holds an MA in History and an MLS from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a BA in International Relations and History from American University.