Faculty

Marion Fourcade is Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton University Press, 2009), The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy, Harvard University Press 2024), and numerous articles on economic knowledge, valuation, and politics in comparative perspective. Her new project examines the political economy of truth in the age of AI. She is a recipient of the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award, the Society for the Social...

Cori Hayden is the Robert H. Lowie Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Social Science Matrix. Her research and teaching focus on the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 2000 and has held fellowships at the Center for US-Mexican Studies in San Diego, the University of Cambridge, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto. At Berkeley, she has served as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology and as the Director of the Center for Science, Technology...

I am a historian of the human dimensions of modern science and technology, and my work looks at three interrelated questions. How do we scaffold our world with abstraction, quantification, prediction, and optimization? How are these drives shaped by, and shape, our society, culture, politics, and institutions? And how do we deal with what happens, individually and institutionally, past and present, when abstraction falls short and our lives burble over the edge of this disciplinary frame?

I was originally trained as a historian of 20th-century physics, and my work has increasingly shifted to...

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. My work brings together German intellectual history, literary theory, and media studies, with a current emphasis on how large language models and generative AI are reshaping the conditions of writing, interpretation, and textual culture. I am especially interested in the ways computational systems produce new expectations of style, voice, and meaning—and in what these shifts reveal about older philosophical debates on language and the human, from Hans Blumenberg to twentieth-century philosophical...

Dr. Claudia Natalia von Vacano is the Founding Executive Director and Senior Research Associate of UC Berkeley’s Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab), including the Berkeley Federal Statistical Research Data Center. Her work advances interdisciplinary approaches to computational research, data science education, digital humanities, and trustworthy AI.

At D-Lab, Dr. von Vacano leads programs that support computational and data-intensive research through training, consultations, working groups, courses, and cross-campus collaboration. She partners with the College of Computing, Data Science...

Genevieve Smith is a social scientist examining how values, power, and economic incentives shape AI systems, the ensuing social impacts, and pathways toward more equitable technological futures. Her research sits at the intersection of political economy, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and development studies. Her research agenda centers on two interconnected prongs that examine: (1) how power, values, and economic incentives shape AI systems and whom they serve, including evaluating system outputs where possible; and (2) how AI might be built and governed differently. Across...

Anushah Hossain is a historian of technology and Research Director of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley.

SEI has been central to bringing more than two-thirds of the scripts now in the Unicode Standard (the infrastructure that lets computers represent written language) into digital use. Her work sits on both sides of that standard. As a participant, she evaluates and funds proposals for new scripts and mediates among standards-makers, user communities, and linguistic experts. As a scholar, she asks what follows from handling the world's...

Carmine-Emanuele Cella is a composer. His music is about writing the sound itself: each note and each musical figure are the components of a global sonic image, unified and physical, that reveals the tragic story of sounds.

His works have been commissioned and premiered by leading institutions and performers in Europe. IRCAM commissioned Già s'ottenebra il giorno, premiered at the Centre Pompidou by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Leo Hussain (ManiFeste, 2012), and, with Radio France, Reflets de l'ombre for large orchestra and live electronics, premiered at the Salle Pleyel...

Greg Niemeyer is a data artist and Professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He's the former director and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He started out with studies in Classics and Photography in Switzerland and switched to new media when he moved to the Bay Area in 1992.

He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Genres in 1997. Since childhood, Niemeyer was fascinated with making mirrors, and he still makes mirrors: media which allow us to see things from a new point of view, a point of view that is not our own, revealing both...

My current work engages two features of what I term platform relatedness, with a focus on society, politics, and health care in India and in the United States. This has led me to two particular forms of engagement.

The first addresses the ways age and generation are being remade, and it does so in two ways: through a project on the violence of platform-dependency for the frail elderly in the United States, and through a project on how youth cultures come to depend on the hyper-mediated experience of having been given “a broken world,” environmentally and politically, by older, parental...