Anin Luo is an intellectual historian whose research focuses on the modern life and medical sciences, legal and international history, and environmental history. Her research takes a global approach to science, technology, and medicine in the twentieth century, paying particular attention to liberal and socialist Europe as well as China.
Anin’s research explores how humans’ relationship to the environment became a scientific question and a problem of international governance in the twentieth century. Her dissertation, a postwar international history of “immunity,” follows scientific and political contestations around how to make life immune to threats in the environment. Treating living beings’ vulnerability to the environment as both a biological and political problem, it provides a global history of how liberal, socialist, and postcolonial scientists, physicians, politicians, legal thinkers, and public health officials used knowledge and practices around immunology to contest claims to health and welfare at international forums like the United Nation, World Health Organization, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations.
She has also explored her historical interest in human life through “the animal”: she has published on legal deliberations on animal violence in interwar Britain, laboratory animals in Republican China, and the emergence of moral and legal “personhood” for animals and the environment in the 1970s.