Lochlann Jain is an award-winning scholar and an artist, and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. They are known for their interdisciplinary analyses of the politics and economics of human flourishing in the history of medicine.

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Jain's second book, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013), was written in response the vast differences between the ways that medicine, regulatory agencies and journalism understood cancer, and the ways that people, once diagnosed, were called to make sense of the new world they were living in. The work has been praised as “a remarkable achievement,” (TLS), “a whip-smart read.” (Discover Magazine), “brilliant and disturbing,” (Nature Magazine), and having “the phenomenological nuance of James Joyce.” Malignant won multiple prizes for work in anthropology and medical journalism, including the Staley Prize, June Roth Memorial Award, Fleck Prize, Edelstein Prize, Victor Turner Prize, and the Diana Forsythe Prize.

 

Jain's current work is on drowning. Beginning the mid-1700s in Europe, the revolutionary idea that drowned bodies could be revived became a subject of intense research and activism. The research starts there, and gets weirder – reading across art, resuscitation dolls, slavery, and Romantic poetry to try to understand the ways in which air, water, and breath have carried avowed and disavowed meaning across cultural and industrial lives. This project will be published as a book of prose and drawings entitled The Lung is a Bird and a Fish. Pressing the symbolic aspects of drownign further has led me to design and cast a series of five medals based on life-saving medals, in a project entitled An Apocrypha of Drowning. In awarding the project honorable mention, the project was recently described by the jury: “Jain’s humorous, uncanny medal designs ask how knowledge about drowning circulated through modes of fascination and commemoration, and in relation to notions of life, death and spectatorship.”  

 

Jain is also writing a book on the development of the first hepatitis B vaccine. 

 

A book of drawings, Things that Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), reconsiders and interrupts the ways in which categories underpin knowledge systems.

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Jain's first book, Injury (Princeton UP: 2006), analyzed the twentieth century emergence of tort law in the United States as a highly politicized and problematic form of regulating the design of mass-produced commodities in light of their propensity to injure naïve consumers. The book analyzes the history of the way in which product design has encoded assumptions and biases that have impacted how injuries are distributed and subsequently understood in law.

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Jain's research has been supported by Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the National Humanities Center, The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Award, among others. 

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