Annual Rossi Lecture - The Social Life of DNA: Alondra Nelson (Columbia University) guest speaker

Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - 11:30am to 1:30pm

Amherst Room, Campus Center

Alondra Robinson

“The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome”

Alondra Nelson is a professor of sociology and gender studies and Dean of Social Science at Columbia University, where she served as director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty in 2009, she was on the faculty of Yale University and received its Poorvu Award for teaching excellence.

An interdisciplinary social scientist, she writes about the intersections of science and inequality. Her reviews, writing, and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Science, Boston Globe, and the Guardian. She is author of the award-winning book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination and The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Her edited works include Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh Tu); and Genetics and Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee); and “Afrofuturism,” a special issue of Social Text.

Chair-elect of the Science, Knowledge and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, Dean Nelson has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, and Ford Foundations. She has been a visiting fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Center at the London School of Economics, and the Bavarian American Academy. She is a member of the NSF-funded Council on Big Data, Ethics, and Society, sits on the editorial board of Social Studies of Science, and Public Culture, and serves on the board of advisors of the Data & Society Research Institute.