Jesse F. Ballenger
[homepage] [email]
203 Old Botany
vox 814.865.2223 fax 814.865.3047

Jess Ballenger is assistant professor in the STS program at Penn State. He is a historian of science, medicine, and technology, whose research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of biomedical science, biomedical research policy, the neurosciences, and aging. In broad terms, he is interested in exploring the ways in which science, medicine and technology help to create the cultural categories around which our lives are organized.

Recent projects

Ballenger has just finished a project on the cultural history of Alzheimer’s disease appearing as Self, Senility and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 ).

Ballenger’s interest in the history of Alzheimer’s disease began in the early 1980s when he worked as a nursing assistant in the geriatric ward of a hospital and witnessed the rise of Alzheimer’s disease from a seemingly obscure disease entity to the dominant diagnostic category and way of representing dementia in old age. While his hospital experience gave him a perspective on care giving and the experience of dementia, his graduate work at Case Western Reserve University and postdoctoral work at the Johns Hopkins University gave him an understanding of the perspectives of clinical medicine and biomedical research on AD. Both institutions were rich environments for doing work on the history of AD, and Ballenger has benefited from contact with many researchers and clinicians investigating various aspects of Alzheimer ’s disease.

These experiences convinced him of the importance of interdisciplinary discourse, and he is committed to bringing his perspective on health and medicine as a cultural historian into creative engagement with the perspectives of scholars from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, as well as clinicians, researchers, ethicists, care providers, patients and the general public.

He is co-editor with Peter J. Whitehouse and Konrad Maurer of Concepts of Alzheimer Disease: Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives (Johns Hopkins, 2000). He is currently co-editing another book with Whitehouse, Constantine Lyketsos, Jason Karlawish and Peter Rabins based on an international conference on the history and future of drug development for Alzheimer’s disease that he helped organize at Johns Hopkins in March 2004. The book’s tentative title is Do We Have a Pill for That? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Development Use and Evaluation of Drugs in the Treatment of Dementia.

Teaching

STS 101 – Modern Science, Technology and Human Values
STS 432 – Medical and Heathcare Ethics

At Johns Hopkins University and Case Western Reserve University, Ballenger has taught courses on the history of medicine, aging and the life course, and American society and culture.
Degrees

Post-doctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins University, 2002-2004

Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, 2000.

M.A., Case Western Reserve University, 1994.
B.A., Kent State University, 1989.