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 a graduate certificate in Latin American and Latinx 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 and environmental 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, ethnographic fieldwork, and a wide array of published sources. You can read more about my dissertation research here in English and here in Spanish. For the 2024 - 2025 academic year, I am the John C. Slater Predoctoral Fellow at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Broadly speaking, my research and teaching interests include modern Latin American history, the history and anthropology of health and environment, the history of life and environmental sciences, post-colonial and Indigenous science studies, the global history of drugs, and the digital humanities.
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