Steering Committee
Geri Augusto is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Public Policy. Her current interests are the contested, dynamic interactions between global and local sciences, contemporary indigenous knowledge systems (particularly in southern Africa and Afro-descendent communities), and how these are continually re-shaping the human, the social and the politics of knowledge.Other areas of research and practice include the social and cultural dynamics of technological innovation; international development; transformation of higher education in pluralist, unequal societies; organizational culture and learning in the public sector; and science and technology policy in the Global South.
Lundy Braun is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies. Trained as a biomedical scientist, her current research focuses on the history of race in science, public health, and medicine with special emphasis on the contemporary debate on health inequality and genomics.
Phil Brown is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies. His research interests include citizen science alliances, labor-environment coalitions, health social movements, connections between breast cancer activism and environmental justice, and biomonitoring and household exposure. His most recent book is Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. His other books include Social Movements in Health and No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action, about the Woburn leukemia cluster. He founded and now co-leads the Contested Illnesses Research Group. He also directs the Community Outreach Core of Brown’s Superfund Basic Research Program.
Wendy Chun is an Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media. Her research focuses on new media, comparative media studies, Asian-American culture, and critical theory. Most generally, her scholarly work investigates the relationship between cultural formations and technological artifacts, between theoretical concepts in the humanistic and technological disciplines, and between popular perceptions of technology and technological protocols. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of _Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics_ (MIT, 2006), and co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of _New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005). She is editor of a special issue of _Camera Obscura_ on Race and/as Technology with Lynne Joyrich and her book _Programmed Visions: Race and Software_ should be coming out from MIT in 2010.
Harold J (Hal) Cook has recently joined Brown from London, as the John F. Nickoll Professor of History. He carries on research into medicine and science in the early modern period. His most recent book, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale Univ Press, 2007), explored the connections between economic and philosophical materialism in an age of global commerce. He is currently looking into examples of attempts to exchange words and views ('translations'), as well as goods and descriptions, across cultural boundaries.
Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry and the current Chair of the Committee on Science and Technology Studies. Her most recent book, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, examines the social nature of biological knowledge about animal and human sexuality.
Sherine Hamdy is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. from New York University Department of Anthropology in 2006. Her current book project, Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam and Medicine in Egypt is under contract with the University of California Press. Hamdy teaches courses on theories and controversies in Science and Society, and the anthropology of bioethics. Her research focuses on the anthropology of medicine, health, science, and technology, and the production of knowledge. Her field experience has been in Egypt. Click here for recent articles by Professor Hamdy.
Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History. She is interested in natural knowledge and the imitation of nature in early modern Europe. Her research has examined links among alchemy, religion, gender and politics in the Holy Roman Empire.