I am a historian of medicine, science, and environment in modern Latin America, focusing on Amazônia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. I am currently an Assistant Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
My first book, Psychedelic Alchemy: The Amazonian Origins of the Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens, traces how scientists transformed ayahuasca from a vital regional Amazonian subject into an object of global Western medicine and science, highlighting how Native and folk practitioners and ayahuasca itself contested, facilitated, and restricted this transformation. The research upon which this book is based was jointly awarded the biennial Dissertation Prize (2026) from the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Broadly speaking, I am interested in global histories of medicine, science, drugs, and environment, feminist and Indigenous science studies, modern Latin American history, environmental anthropology, and digital humanities.
I earned my PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, along with a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Latinx Studies. I hold an MA in the History of Medicine from McGill University and a BA (Honours) in History and Psychology from McMaster University. I grew up in the suburbs north of Toronto on the ancestral lands of the Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Anishnaabe peoples, and spent part of my early life along the Kootenay Rockies of the interior of British Columbia.
I can be contacted through email at tdysart8 [at] gatech [dot] edu.