Institution:
Assistant Professor of the History of Science (Medicine), Harvard University; Faculty Director, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Working Group

Interests:
History of medicine, race, and migration; political economy of care; postcolonial studies; globalization and health; immigrant physicians and U.S. healthcare; racial science and global health inequalities

Description:
Eram Alam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University whose research focuses on the history of medicine in the twentieth century, especially the intersections of globalization, race, migration, and health. Her first book, The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), analyzes how postcolonial physician migration from Asia to the United States—catalyzed by the 1965 Hart‑Celler Act—has made immigrant doctors indispensable to U.S. healthcare while channeling them into underserved and marginalized communities. She is also co‑editor (with Dorothy Roberts and others) of Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science (Columbia University Press, 2024), a collection that examines how race functions as a political and scientific technology across global contexts and how racialized science shapes modern notions of human difference and inequality. Her next major project, The Logistical Body, explores how contemporary logistical regimes confront the limits posed by embodied labor, drawing on breakdowns exposed during the COVID‑19 pandemic.