I am an historian and science studies scholar who examines the relationship between health, science, beyond-human beings, and sovereignty in modern Latin America. I am currently a PhD candidate in the History + Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am also completing graduate certificates in Latin American and Latinx Studies, and in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

My dissertation, titled “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of the Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century,” retraces the history of ayahuasca, caapí, and yagé, amongst other sacred plant-beings, as they became entangled with modern scientific, particularly biomedical and pharmaceutical, projects in the northwestern Amazon. This project draws from archival and museum collections in Brazil, Colombia, Perú, the United States, and the United Kingdom, along with oral histories, interviews, and a wide array of published sources. You can read more about my dissertation research here in English and aquí en español. For the 2023 - 2024 academic year, I will be the Allington Dissertation Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

Broadly speaking, my research and teaching interests include the anthropology and history of health, healing, and the body, the history of human and life sciences, post-colonial and Indigenous science studies, the global history of drugs, Amazonian and non-human anthropology, and the digital humanities.

I have collaborated on several projects in the global history of science, including in the digital humanities, and am currently a co-chair with the Graduate and Early Career Caucus of the History of Science Society.

Prior to beginning at Penn, I received my MA in the History of Medicine from McGill University and my BA in History + Psychology (Hon.) from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. I grew up in the suburbs north of Toronto, on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Anishinabewaki, Haudenosaunee, and Mississauga, and along the Kootenay Rockies of British Columbia, on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Ktunaxa Nation.

You can contact me at tdysart [at] sas [dot] upenn [dot] edu