Stanford University
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Lochlann Jain
Professor of Anthropology
BioJain is an award-winning author and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Visiting Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London, and a Research Affiliate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. His work aims to unsettle some of the deeply held assumptions about objectivity that underlie the history of medical research. Jain is the author of Injury (Princeton UP: 2006); Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013); and a book of drawings, Things that Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity (U of Toronto Press: 2019).
Jain is currently working on two books. The first, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, develops the concept of The WetNet, which refers to fluid bonding among humans and animals in ways that create pathways for the transmission of pathogens. Specifically, mid-century bioscientific practices such as blood harvesting and transfusion, and vaccine development and testing involved exchanges in human and animal effluvia, the risks of which have largely been disavowed. Jain’s current book project elucidates the concept of The WetNet through a rigorous history of the hepatitis B virus and the development of the first hepatitis B vaccine.
The second project, “The Lung is a Bird and a Fish,” is a cultural history of drowning in prose and drawing. -
Shiven Jain
Undergraduate, Anthropology
Undergraduate, Art & Art History
Undergraduate, International Comparative and Area StudiesBioThroughout my academic journey, I have sought to reimagine education as a collective act of meaning-making rather than a transactional exchange of knowledge. At Indus International School Pune, I collaborated with the English department to redesign our pedagogical framework: students alternated as instructors, teachers assumed the role of facilitators, and classrooms became dialogic spaces for co-construction. What began as a localized experiment now informs learning models across fifteen schools—a testament to the transformative potential of student agency when institutions make space for it.
This commitment to humanized learning permeates my broader work. Through IKKIS: The Podcast, I engage with actors, historians, and critics to examine postcolonial cinema as a site of resistance and reclamation. As the founder of the International Youth Philosophy Initiative (IYPI), I convene interdisciplinary seminars with peers from 37 countries, using literature, aesthetics, and critical philosophy to counter apathy and reanimate ethical inquiry.
Research forms the cornerstone of my intellectual life. For instance, my paper, Reclaiming Sociocultural Agency: The Resurrection of India and Africa in Postcolonial Cinema (The Schola, 2024), investigates narrative reclamation in the aftermath of cultural subjugation. I similarly approach media and cultural criticism as modes of activism: as Director of Content Development at RAYS Magazine, I lead initiatives that interrogate and reframe portrayals of mental health in popular culture, overseeing bimonthly publications rooted in accessibility and literacy. My essays for Film Companion, Youth Ki Awaaz, and Flick Deposit likewise aim to navigate—and, where necessary, dismantle—the ideological scaffolding of mainstream cinema.
To me, leadership and mentorship are natural extensions of intellectual agency. As a Teaching Assistant in English Language and Literature, I have conducted over 150 seminars exploring the intersections of language, politics, and aesthetics—facilitating sessions on figures such as Patrick Chappatte, Audre Lorde, Henrik Ibsen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Across research, pedagogy, media, and mentorship, my work is undergirded by a singular conviction: that education, if it is to remain ethical, must center not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the reclamation of voice, the recognition of alterity, and the radical possibility of collective transformation.
