Rosanna Dent works at the intersection of history of science and medicine, Latin American history, Native studies, and feminist science and technology studies. Broadly, she is interested in how human interactions unfold in the context of knowledge production, and the implications of these relationships for questions of political and social justice. She has published on twentieth-century histories of human genetics and epidemiology in Brazil and is currently working on a monograph on the history of human sciences research in A'uwe (Xavante, Indigenous) communities in Central Brazil.
In collaboration with colleagues and members of A'uwe communities in the Indigenous Territory of Pimentel Barbosa, Mato Grosso, Dent is also working on a digital archive project to return historical documentation and publications produced since the 1950s to the Native communities they document.
Her work has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton NJ), the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Max Planck Center for the History of Science, the Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright IIE.
Selected publications
2024 Dent, Rosanna. 'Bureaucratic Vulnerability: Possession, Sovereignty, and Relationality in Brazilian Genetics Research Regulation.' In Empire, Colonialism and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific. Edited by Adam Warren, Julia Rodriguez, and Stephen Casper. Cambridge University Press.
2022 Dent, Rosanna. 'Relational Infrastructures: A'uwẽ-Xavante Strategies to Enrol and Manage Warazú Researchers.' In Invisible Labour in Modern Science. Edited by Jenny Bangham, Xan Chako, and Judith Kaplan for the Global Epistemics series at Rowman and Littlefield.
2022 Dent, Rosanna. 'Whose Home is the Field?' Focus: The Field, edited by Cameron Brinitzer and Etienne Benson, Isis 113 (1): 137–43.
2020 Dent, Rosanna. 'Subject 01: Exemplary Indigenous Masculinity in Cold War Genetics.' The British Journal for the History of Science 53 (3): 311–332.
2019 Dent, Rosanna and Ricardo Ventura Santos. '"An Immense Mosaic": Race-Mixing and the Creation of the Genetic Nation in 1960s Brazil.' In Luso-tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism in the Lusophone World. Edited by Warwick Anderson, Ricardo Roque, and Ricardo Ventura Santos. New York: Berghahn Press.
2017 Dent, Rosanna and Ricardo Ventura Santos. '"An Unusual and Fast Disappearing Opportunity": Infectious Disease, Indigenous Populations, and New Biomedical Knowledge in Amazonia, 1960–1970.' Perspectives on Science 25 (5): 585–605.
Under contract
Dent, Rosanna. Research Returns: Science and Affect in Indigenous Brazil. Book manuscript for Global Studies in Medicine, Science, Race and Colonialism series at Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by Ahmed Ragab.
Digital Humanities initiatives
Rowasu'u: An A'uwẽ Archive of Scientific Objects. Collaborative community archive project with Aldeias Pimentel Barbosa, Etênhiritipá, Paraíso, Santa Vitória, Soripẽ, Wederã and with James R. Welch, Lori Jahnke, and Laura R. Graham.
História oral da genética humana UFRGS. Co-coordinated with Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes.
