Science and Technology Studies

Ryo Morimoto

Through his ethnographic research, Morimoto aims to create a space for and language to think about nuclear things and other contaminants as part and parcel of what it means to live in the late industrial and post-fallout era, rather than as alien species that must and should be held at a distance from humans. Morimoto is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled The Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihood in Fukushima’s Gray Zone. This book integrates environmental anthropology, recent Japanese history, and science and technology studies to understand the uses and applications of technologies in social processes whereby certain sensory-cognitive experiences are (im)materialized. Morimoto uses the term “nuclear ghost” to analyze the struggles of representing and experiencing low-dose radiation exposure in coastal Fukushima, where individual, social, political and scientific determinations of the threshold of exposure are often inconsistent.
Alan Mann

Alan Mann is a physical anthropologist whose interests include paleoanthropology and human evolution. He is the author of Some Paleodemographic Aspects of the South African Australopithecines and is the co-author (with Mark L. Weiss) of Human Biology and Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective.
Peter Bogucki
Janet Monge
Rena Lederman

Professor Lederman’s recent interests have included relationality, expertise, and ethics; the politics of “method” in human sciences (particularly anthropology); disciplinary knowledges as “moral orders”; science/humanities tensions in popular and academic discourse; and bureaucratic and regulatory policies and practices.
Elizabeth A. Davis

Elizabeth Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power as areas for ethnographic and theoretical engagement. Her particular interest is in how the ties that bind people to communities and states are yielded and inflected by knowledge: that is, how certain kinds of truths mediate conceptions of self and conceptions of others – as psychiatric subjects, for example, or as subjects of history. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the “multicultural” borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently working on her second book, The Good of Knowing: War, Time, and Transparency in Cyprus (forthcoming from Duke University Press), a collaborative engagement with Cypriot knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, documentary film, and “conspiracy theory.”
Nomi Stone

Nomi Stone’s transnational research, spanning the Middle East and the United States, focuses on the politics and representation of difference in the context of contemporary war and its diasporic aftermath. Her current book manuscript in progress, "Human Technologies and the Making of American War" is a political phenomenology of American Empire. She earned a PhD in Anthropology at Columbia, an MFA in Poetry at Warren Wilson and has a Masters of Philosophy in Modern Middle East Studies from Oxford.
Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. An anthropologist and a sociologist, he has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, illuminating important issues about the AIDS epidemic, social inequalities in health and the changing landscape of global health. He later conducted research in political and moral anthropology, analyzing the reformulation of injustice and violence as suffering and trauma, and the expansion of an international humanitarian government.
Carolyn Rouse

Carolyn Rouse is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a high school in a fishing village in Ghana. In the summer of 2016 she began studying declining white life expectancies in rural California as a follow-up to her research on racial health disparities. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015). As an extension of her commitment and training in visual anthropology, in the summer of 2016 she created the Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab (VizE Lab) to work with students and colleagues on ways to visualize complex ethnographic data. One project she is currently working on through the lab brings together 60 years of biological data with 60 years of social scientific data to study epigenetic effects on physical development.
João Biehl

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Woodrow Wilson School Faculty Associate at Princeton University. He is also the Co-Director of Princeton’s Global Health Program. Biehl’s main research and teaching interests center on medical and political anthropology, ethnography and critical theory, the social studies of science and technology, global health, pharmaceuticals, affect and agency, and religion and German colonialism (with a regional focus on Latin America and Brazil).