Research Interests

Planetary health humanities, anthropology of science, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, environmental anthropology, food systems, plant humanities, Brazil, Mozambique, Latin America

Bio

Nicole Labruto is an Associate Teaching Professor in and Director of the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities. She received her BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Mount Holyoke College, her MA in Cultural Anthropology from the New School for Social Research, and her PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during which she was a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. She is also the recipient of multiple fellowships, including from the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Foundation. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Her research integrates the anthropology of science, environmental anthropology, and postcolonial studies to bring new perspectives on the study of agriculture, food, and sustainability in Brazil, as well as scholarly engagements with plants, energy, and healing. My research examines how bioscientists in Brazil are leveraging colonial plantation infrastructures and technologies into sustainability-oriented climate change solutions in Brazil and Mozambique. Following fieldwork with molecular biologists, biochemists, and agronomic economists all working with sugarcane at different scales of intervention, the book presents Brazilian engagements with cane as both a historical force and a site of future making. I argue that climate change is reorienting the ethical stakes of global South bioscientists, whose applied practices, research techniques, and goals are coming to center around “sustainability” and “green capitalism” founded on colonial infrastructures. The project grapples with sugarcane, a vegetal being seemingly beyond redemption, yet one that fills the dreams of global South scientists who see it as a critical component of a sustainable future.

Nicole is an Anthropologist-in-Residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and serves as a member of the Curatorial Circle of the Ecological Design Collective. She is the Co-Lead of the Food Systems Research Hub at the JHU Planetary Health Institute, and co-chairs the Environmental Justice and Community Partnerships Committee of the Sustainability Leadership Council. She is a member of the advisory boards of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx Studies Program, and the Baltimore Compost Collective. She is affiliate faculty in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Environmental Studies.

Teaching

Black Food and Land Sovereignty Practicum
Earth on Drugs: Medicine, Bodies, Environment
Health, Science, Environment
Food as War, Food as Resistance, Food as Liberation
Anthropology of the Biosciences
Anthropology of Food
Sustainable Design Studio
Science Studies and Medical Humanities: Theory and Methods
Medicine, Science, and the Humanities Research Capstone