Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Associate Professor, History, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Office: SS 217
Phone: (773) 702-0638

Director, Nicholson Center for British Studies
Faculty Member, Nicholson Center for British Studies

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s field specialties include British history; the British Empire; the Enlightenment; science and environmental history; political economy; cornucopianism and the Anthropocene.


Lorraine Daston

Visiting Professor
History and Social Thought

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Her work focuses on the history of rationality, especially but not exclusively scientific rationality. She has written on the history of wonder, objectivity, observation, the moral authority of nature, probability, Cold War rationality, and scientific modernity. Her current book projects are a history of rules and an inquiry into the relationship between the moral and natural orders.


James A. Evans

Professor; Director, Knowledge Lab; Faculty Director, Masters Program in Computational Social Science; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute

Office: SS 420
Phone: (773) 834-3612

Interests: knowing, computational social science, collective intelligence, science of science, skills and learning, machine learning & AI, human-machine intelligence, human and machine languages, fields and networks, text and image analysis, the science of data.


Adrian Johns

Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Office: HM-W 602
Phone: (773) 702-2334

FIELD SPECIALTIES

History of science; British history; history of intellectual property; history of the book and other media


Emily Kern

History of Science Assistant Professor and the College

Office: SSRB 517
(773) 702-7888

Emily Kern is a historian of science, with a specialty in the intellectual and cultural history of anthropology, evolution, and the life sciences. Her research and teaching focus on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


Karin Knorr Cetina

Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor (Jointly Appointed in Anthropology)

Office: SS 424
Phone: (773) 834-3312

Interests: economic sociology, sociology of science, consumption, globalization, sociology of culture, qualitative methods, contemporary theory.


Joseph Masco

Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College

Office: Haskell 201
Phone: (773) 834-7807

Joseph Masco (PhD, UC San Diego 1999) is Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College.  Working at the intersection of science studies, environmental studies, media studies, and critical theory, his scholarship examines the material, affective, and conceptual force of technological revolution.


Salikoko S. Mufwene

The Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Linguistics and Humanities Collegiate Division

Office: Wieboldt 411
Phone: (773) 702-8531

Dr. Mufwene currently works on language evolution, focusing on language speciation (including the emergence of creole language varieties, of African-American English, and of indigenized Englishes), on the phylogenetic emergence of language, and on colonization, globalization, and the vitality of languages (including language birth and death). He is also exploring ways in which economics bears on language vitality and language influences economic development. His earlier work was on structural aspects of Gullah, of Caribbean English creoles (chiefly Jamaican and Guyanese Creoles), and of African American English, as well as the morphosyntax of Bantu (especially Kituba, Lingala, and Kiyansi). He was trained in lexical semantics and lexicography (the focus of his earliest scholarship), in syntax, and in language contact. He has been at Chicago since January 1992.


Thomas Pashby

Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Office: Stuart Hall, Room 231-B
Phone: (773) 834-8191

Research Interests: Philosophy of Physics, History and Philosophy of Science


Robert J. Richards

Director, Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine

Faculty Member and Steering Committee, Institute on the Formation of Knowledge

Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the College

Office: SS 205
Phone: (773) 702-8348

Professor Richards does research in the history and philosophy of psychology and biology. This includes particular interest in evolutionary biopsychology, ethology, and sociobiology, as well as theories of perception from the ancient period to the present day.


Michael Rossi

Chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, 2022-2023
Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Office: SS 206
Phone: (773) 702-5266

Michael Rossi’s field specialties include medicine and the body; history of perception and visual culture; history of social science; American intellectual and cultural history.


James T. Sparrow

Associate Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College;

Master, Social Sciences Collegiate Division, the College

Office: SS 225B
Phone: (773) 834-1271

FIELD SPECIALTIES

Modern US political history; political economy; war and society; human rights; America in the world; history of social science


Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College

Co-Director, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory

Office: Haskell 314
Phone: (773) 702-6151

(PhD, MIT, 2002; Professor; Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory) Biotechnology; capitalism; comparative ethnography; genomics; globalization; nation-state; political economy; post-colonialism; science and technology studies; subjectivity; India. (On leave winter 2019 through autumn 2019)