Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics, and computer science define and theorize their objects of study, particularly as these objects — waves, life, sound, code — reach their conceptual limits. A Book of Waves (Duke University Press, 2023) details how scientists at sea and in the lab monitor and model ocean waves, seeking to capture in technical language these forces of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. The book includes reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist and queer theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, and cosmology. Helmreich’s previous ethnography, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty. Winner of the 2017 J.I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research, the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science, the 2010 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society, and the 2010 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from Society for Cultural Anthropology, the book charts how marine microbes are entangled with debates about the origin of life, climate change, property in the ocean commons, and the possibility of life on other worlds. An earlier book, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998) is an ethnography of computer modeling in the life sciences. It won the 2000 Diana Forsythe Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that asks after changing definitions of life, water, and sound (and features a soundtrack) and won the 2016 Michelle Kendrick Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts. What Is Life?, co-edited with Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, and Michael Rossi, is an art+science book that reproduces pages from key texts in the history of biology, interleaving these with essays that ask what the category of “life” has meant to biologists. Helmreich received his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and prior to coming to MIT held postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell, Rutgers, and NYU. In 2018, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, Cabinet, The Wire, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Public Culture.

Thursday, October 31, 12:15 pm