Jessica Wang’s main interests lie in U.S. political and intellectual history, political theory, the history of science and technology, and the history of U.S. foreign relations. More recently, she has been delving into the history of medicine and public health, as well as social and urban history. Her book, American Science in an Age of Anxiety (1999), provided a major study of the effects of cold war anti communism on the American scientific community, and her more recent publications include an essay on the relationship between the United States and the United Nations and the dynamics of unilateralism and internationalism in U.S. foreign policy, and an article on American legal thought and conceptions of the administrative state in the 1930s. Wang is currently pursuing two major book-length projects. The first, tentatively titled "State of Knowledge: Social Science and New Deal Public Policy," examines the interplay between an early twentieth century qualitative tradition in American social science and public policy under the New Deal of the 1930s. The second project is a social history of rabies in New York City, with the working title, "Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies and Urban Life in New York City, 1840-2000."

Essays under consideration:

"Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Dread Disease, and the Politics of Animal Control in Urban America, 1850-1920," submitted.

“The science of industrial labor relations and U.S. public policy: William Leiserson, David Saposs, and labor economics in the interwar years,” undergoing revisions.

“From the Social Survey to the Securities Market: William O. Douglas, the Protective Committee Study, and Social Knowledge in New Deal America,” undergoing revisions.

Selected Publications:

“Condon, Edward Uhler,” New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 2007).

“Imagining the Administrative State: Legal Pragmatism, Securities Regulation, and New Deal Liberalism,” Journal of Policy History 17:3 (2005): 257-93.

“Purges in Comparative Perspective: Rules for Exclusion and Inclusion in the Scientific Community under Political Pressure,” co-authored with Richard Beyler and Alexei Kojevnikov, in Osiris, vol. 20, Politics and Science in Wartime: Comparative International Perspectives on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (2005), ed. Carola Sachse and Mark Walker, pp. 23-48.

“The United States, the United Nations, and the Other Post-Cold War World Order: Internationalism and Unilateralism in the American Century,” in Cold War Triumphalism: The Politics of American History After the Fall of Communism, ed. Ellen W. Schrecker (New York: New Press, 2004), pp. 201-34.

“Scientists and the Problem of the Public in Cold War America, 1945-1960,” in Osiris, vol. 17, Science and Civil Society (2002), ed. Lynn K. Nyhart and Thomas H. Broman, pp. 323-47.

“Merton’s shadow: Perspectives on science and democracy since 1940,” Historical studies in the physical and biological sciences 30:1 (Fall 1999): 279-306.

American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anti-Communism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

“Liberals, the progressive left, and the political economy of postwar American science: The National Science Foundation debate revisited,” Historical studies in the physical and biological sciences 26:1 (Fall 1995): 139-66.

“Science, Security, and the Cold War: The Case of E. U. Condon,” Isis 83 (June 1992): 238-69.

Current graduate students:

Ph.D.: Denzil Ford, Henry Trim, Patrick Slaney, Melvyn Lebe (UCLA)

M.A.: Philip Dunlop

Doctoral dissertations supervised or co-supervised:

Victor J. Rodriguez, "The Practical Man: John Dewey, the Idea of America, and the Making of the Modern Mexican, 1923-1934" (UCLA, 2009)

Megan K. Barnhart, “‘To Secure the Benefits of Science to the General Welfare’: The Scientists’ Movement and the American Public during the Cold War, 1945-1960” (UCLA, 2007).

Peter S. Alagona, “Transforming Conservation: Endangered Species, Biodiversity, and the Political Economy of Science in California” (UCLA, 2006).

Laura J. Gifford, “The Center Cannot Hold: The 1960 Presidential Election and the Rise of Modern Conservatism” (UCLA, 2006).

Amanda K. McVety, “Truman’s Point Four Program and the Creation of America’s Modern Diplomatic Vision” (UCLA, 2006).

Jessica B. Elkind, “The First Casualties: American Nation Building Programs in South Vietnam, 1955-1965” (UCLA, 2005).