Jessica Leigh Hester studies nineteenth century U.S. history, with a focus on the history of medicine, political and social organizing, and the collection and exhibition of human remains in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. 

Her dissertation, about grave robbing perpetrated by and for medical schools toward the end of the nineteenth century, investigates how Black laborers, churches, benevolent organizations, social clubs, newspapers, and entrepreneurs pursued citizenship and autonomy by negotiating uneasy relationships with death workers and members of the growing medical field, from anatomy professors to public health officials. 

Jessica’s work received the 2024 Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine and has been supported by fellowships at the Drexel Legacy Center and the Library Company of Philadelphia, where she held the 2025 Endowed Fellowship in African American History. In 2025-2026, she is a Research Fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

At Hopkins, Jessica is a fellow in the Death + Data Lab, part of the LifexCode project. She has also been a Hugh Hawkins fellow, working on community-engaged public history and digital humanities projects around the human remains held by and in the university. Jessica’s academic articles, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Nineteenth Century Studies, Isis, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Nursing Clio, Winterthur Portfolio, and more. 

Jessica received an A.B. in English and Gender Studies from the University of Chicago and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Hunter College. She is also a science journalist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Her first book, Sewer, was released by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. Her second book, about trace fossils, is forthcoming from Random House.