SCIENCE IN HUMAN CULTURE PROGRAM

Ken Alder (Ph.D., History of Science, Harvard) is a Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities. He studies the history of science and technology in the context of social and political change. His first book, Engineering the Revolution: Army and Enlightenment in France (Princeton, 1997; Chicago, 2010), won the 1998 Dexter Prize from the Society of the History of Technology. His second book, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World (The Free Press, 2002), examined the origins of the metric system in Revolutionary France. This book has been translated into 12 languages and won the Davis Prize (HSS), the Dingle Prize (BSHS), and the Kagan Prize (The Historical Society). His most recent book, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (The Free Press, 2007; Bison Books, 2009) examines the fraught relation between truth and justice in twentieth-century United States. He was awarded a fellowship at the Kaplan Humanities Institute for 2019-2020 for his project on the history of technology.

Sokhieng Au (Ph.D., UC-Berkeley, 2005, MPH Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2009), is a medical historian and public health practitioner focused on health and illness in the Global South. Her research examines medicine and disease broadly in both contemporary and historical perspectives, with particular focus on (cultural, scientific, technical) exchanges/interventions and global inequities in health. She is an area specialist in Southeast Asia and Central Africa. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders and has researched and taught at universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her first monograph was a study of French colonial medicine in Cambodia. Her two most recent publications examined Belgian colonial medicine in the Congo, "Belgian Colonial Medicine" (co-authored with Anne Cornet), and present-day antibiotic overuse in Afghanistan in "'They eat it like sweets': a mixed methods study of antibiotic perceptions and their use among patients, prescribers and pharmacists in a district hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan" (co-authored) with Burtscher D, Van den Bergh R, Masood N, et al. 

Moya Bailey is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).

Lydia Barnett (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2011) specializes in Early Modern Europe and her work explores the intersections of science, religion, and the environment in transnational contexts. Her current book, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe explores the scientific imagination of global natural disasters at the turn of the eighteenth century. This global catastrophic imaginary was enabled by the expansion of long-distance networks (commercial, imperial, religious, and scholarly) and gave rise to new forms of environmental consciousness that were strongly linked to both Christian theology and imperial ideology.

Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (courtesy) at Northwestern University, and Director of Graduate Studies for the MTS PhD. He holds secondary appointments at LACS and the IPTD Programs. He is a sociologist interested in culture, arts, knowledge and globalization. His book The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012), and Honorable mention for the ASA Distinguished Book award (2014). He is the editor of three volumes on theory, culture, and knowledge, including Social Theory Now (with Monika Krause and Isaac Reed, University of Chicago Press, 2017) and has published articles on sociological theory, sociology of culture, and the arts in venues such as Sociological Theory, Theory, Culture & Society, British Journal of Sociology and Theory & Society, among many others. In 2019, he started his tenure as co-Editor in Chief of Qualitative Sociology. His new book, The Perfect Fit. Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press), is based on five-year ethnographic research on fashion, creativity, and globalization, following how a shoe is imagined, sketched, designed, developed, and produced in between the US, Europe, Brazil and China.

Pablo J. Boczkowski is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media, and Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Leadership for Creative Enterprises program, both at Northwestern, and Co-Founder and Co- Director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, a joint initiative between Northwestern and Universidad de San Andrés, in Buenos Aires. In 2020 he was named Fellow of the International Communication Association, and in 2022 elected Chair of the Fellows. His research program examines the dynamics of digital culture from a comparative perspective. He is the author of six books, four edited volumes, and more than sixty journal articles. Three of his books were published in 2021: Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty (Oxford University Press), The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (with Eugenia Mitchelstein, MIT Press) and The Journalism Manifesto (with Barbie Zelizer and Chris Anderson, Polity). His next book, forthcoming with MIT Press in spring 2023, is To Know Is To Compare: Studying Social Media Across Countries, Media and Platforms (with Mora Matassi). He is currently working on The Patina of Distrust: Misinformation in a Context of Generalized Skepticism (with Eugenia Mitchelstein, Facundo Suenzo, and María Celeste Wagner). He writes regularly for Infobae América and Revista Anfibia. 

Lina Britto (Ph.D. New York University) specializes in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates illegal narcotics networks in Colombia, particularly marijuana, in the context of a growing articulation between the country and the United States during the Cold War. She has published in Revista Contemporánea, the Hispanic American Historical Review (spring 2015), North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and El Espectador (Colombia). Her courses at Northwestern focus on the hemispheric history of narcotic trafficking, the war on drugs, popular music, and oral history.

Jeannette Colyvas (Ph.D., Education, Stanford) interests are in learning and organizational change. Her current research addresses university-industry relations, scientist collaboration networks, and the development and commercialization of academic research, particularly with respect to the biotech industry. She is interested in organizations and entrepreneurship, comparing public, private, and non-profit forms of organizing, and the study of networks. Professor Colyvas teaches the course Tools for Organizational Analysis at Northwestern and while at Stanford co-taught graduate courses on the nonprofit sector with Professor Walter W. Powell. Her published work has appeared in the journals Management Science and Research in Organizational Behavior.

Steven Epstein (Ph.D., Sociology, Berkeley) is the John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Sociology. He studies the “politics of knowledge”—more specifically, the contested production of expert and especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. He is especially known for two books: Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (California, 1996), and Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago, 2007), both of which received multiple awards. Epstein’s newest book, The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. Epstein serves on the editorial board of the journals Social Studies of Science and Science, Technology, & Human Values. He is a past chair of the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, and he has served on the council of the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Gary A. Fine received his Ph. D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University and is a James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is interested in understanding difficult reputations and problematic collective memories of figures such as Joseph McCarthy, Charles Lindbergh, Warren Harding, and Benedict Arnold. This research was published in Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America (2012). His current research involves shifting reputations and political positions of Southern segregationist politics and the examination of ruptures in political alliances. He was recently awarded a fellowship at the Kaplan Humanities Institute for 2019-2020 for his project on arts training in the American University.

Michelle N. Huang (Ph.D. English, Women’s Studies, Pennsylvania State University), jointly appointed in the English Department and in the Asian American Studies Program, has research and teaching interests in contemporary Asian American literature, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Her current project, “Molecular Race,” examines posthumanist aesthetics in post-1965 Asian American literature to trace racial representation and epistemology at nonhuman, minute scales. “Molecular Race” argues that a rapprochement with scientific discourse is necessary to fully grasp how the formal and aesthetic qualities of Asian American literature unsettle sedimented structures of racial formation. Michelle’s work appears in Twentieth-Century Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, and Post 45: Contemporaries, among other venues.

Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., History, UC Berkeley) specializes in the history of the United States within a global context and teaches U.S. intellectual history, U.S. foreign relations, and global history. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offered a critical account of U.S. grassroots development projects, at home and abroad. He is particularly interested in the role that technology and infrastructure play in global power. His most recent book, How to Hide an Empire was published in 2019 and is about territories of the United States overseas.

Peter Locke (Ph.D., Princeton) is a cultural and medical anthropologist focused on bringing ethnographic evidence to the comparative study of global health and humanitarian intervention in post-conflict societies. His field research, writing, and teaching all explore and critique the intersection of humanitarian work and reigning modes of evidence production in contexts of contentious local politics and lingering histories of conflict and mass violence. Locke’s doctoral research in Bosnia-Herzegovina examined how the urban poor cope with traumatic histories and rebuild their lives in a new post-war state and economy; more specifically, he charted the impact and sustainability of humanitarian psychiatry and psychosocial support services for war survivors in Sarajevo. Prior to joining Northwestern’s faculty, Locke served as a postdoctoral research associate and then as a lecturer for Princeton University’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy.

Rajiv K. Mishra (PhD, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) is an assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar (NUQ) jointly affiliated with the communication and liberal arts programs. He has training and exposure in the fields of computer science, internet, sociology and science and technology studies (STS). His research and teaching interests lie in large technological systems, digital health and universal health coverage, biometric governance, digital state and welfare, frugality and tinkering, and methodology and methods in social sciences. He has published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Social Science & Medicine (Digital health for all: The turn to digitized healthcare in India), Science, Technology and Society (Smart cards for all: Digitalisation of universal health coverage in India) and Global Policy (The Appropriated Body: Biometrics Regime, The Digital State and Healthcare in Contemporary India). He also has a book chapter (The Digital State: A Tale of Tweets and Foods in Contemporary India) in an edited volume Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational and Social Exchanges (Routledge, 2019). He is also an active member of various research networks such as Global Health (The Collective for the Political Determinants of Health), Global Sociology (Global Qualitative Sociology Network), and Frugality Studies (Transdisciplinary Research Cluster on Frugality Studies).

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. He is the author of Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative Study of the Irish Economy, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective,  The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy and The Enlightened Economy. He has been a visiting Professor at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tel Aviv, University College of Dublin, and the University of Manchester. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

Santiago J. Molina (Ph.D., Sociology, Berkeley) works on the deeply entangled relationship between the production of knowledge and the production of radicalized social orders. Their research focuses on the politics of emerging biotechnologies and the use of ethnic, national, and racial categories in biomedicine. Molina is working on a book project, The Biopolitics of Genome Editing, that draws off ethnographic data to analyze the institutionalization of CRISPR-Cas technology. Molina's research has been published in Annual Review of Sociology, Frontiers in Genetics, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine,  Perspectives on Science, Review of Policy Research and Science. Molina’s teaching has aimed to cultivate practical tools for thinking critically about the relationship between science and society. They have taught courses on sociology of technology, genetics and society, sociology of medicine and illness, and sociological methods.

Rebecca Seligman (Ph.D., Emory) works in the areas of medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and transcultural psychiatry. She is interested in the relationships of individual experience, social and political contexts, and cultural models of selfhood to outcomes such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, somatization, diabetes, and depression. She is also engaged with current neuroscience research concerning these phenomena, and has published several articles critically engaging with the field of cultural neuroscience. She has written Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion, as well as articles that have been published in Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Progress in Brain Research and Ethos. She is co-editor and contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience.

Noelle Sullivan (Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Florida) is a cultural and medical anthropologist focusing on the politics of global health in practice. Sullivan is concerned about what becomes ‘in vogue’ in global health. Which issues or needs tend to be included/excluded or celebrated/marginalized? How global health concerns are taken up, and by whom? She conducts ethnographic fieldwork in northern Tanzania. During 2016-2017, Sullivan was also a Public Voices Fellow of The Op-Ed Project. Her op-eds and a comprehensive list of media publications and appearances can be found on her website. She was awarded a fellowship for 2019-2020 at the Kaplan Humanities Institute for her project on "volunteer tourism" in the Global South.

Helen Tilley (PhD, History, Oxford) has affiliations with the African Studies, Global Health, and Environmental Policy and Culture programs. Her work examines medical, environmental, racial, and anthropological research in colonial and post-colonial contexts, emphasizing intersections with environmental history and development studies. Her book, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2011) explores the dynamic interplay between scientific research and imperialism in British Africa between 1870 and 1950. She has also written articles and book chapters on the history of ecology, eugenics, agriculture, and epidemiology in tropical Africa, and is co-editor with Robert Gordon of Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester, 2007) and with Michael Gordin and Gyan Prakash of Utopia-Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility (Princeton, 2010). Her current project seeks to explain the different scientific studies and legal interventions in the twentieth century that originally helped to construct “traditional medicine” as a viable category of research and policy-making, especially in the contexts of decolonization and the Cold War. She has received grants for her research from the Wellcome Trust and the National Science Foundation.

Keith Woodhouse (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin) focuses on environmentalism and American political and intellectual history in the twentieth century. Recently he published The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism and is working on a project focusing on the role of environmental impact statements in environmental policy and thought.

Sandy Zabell (Ph.D., 1974, Harvard) focus revolves around mathematical probability and Bayesian statistics (in particular, the study of exchangeability). He is also interested in the history, philosophical foundations, and legal applications of probability and statistics. One of his major historical interests at present is the use of cryptology during WWII (in particular the contributions of Alan Turing).  His primary applied interests are in the areas of law and forensic science. He is currently a member of the NIST OSAC (Organization of Scientific Area Committees) Biological Data Interpretation and Reporting Subcommittee, and charged with developing standards and guidelines related to scientifically valid methods of interpretation, statistical analysis and reporting of biological results.