Alondra Nelson

ALONDRA NELSON

Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, she was a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she established and served as the first Dean of the Division of Social Science, and she began her academic career at Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence.

Nelson's research examines the intersection of racial formation, social citizenship, and emerging scientific and technological phenomena. Her award-winning books include The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016); Genetics and the Unsettled Past (2012, with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee); Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (2011); and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001, with Thuy Linh Tu). Her scholarly work has appeared in Science, PLOS journals, and numerous other publications.

From 2021 to 2023, Nelson served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and the first acting director and principal deputy director for science and society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she led the development of the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Nature named her to its global list of "10 People Who Shaped Science," and she was included in the inaugural TIME100 list of most influential people in AI. She was also appointed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres to the UN High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.

Nelson is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and provides policy guidance to governments, legislators, and international organizations. Her honors include the MIT Morison Prize, the Federation of American Scientists Public Service Award, and the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Social Sciences and Technology from the Technical University of Munich. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Medicine. Nelson earned her BA in anthropology from UC San Diego and her PhD in American studies from New York University in 2003.

Bonnie Honig

BONNIE HONIG

Bonnie Honig is Brown University’s Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is author of several books, including: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993, Scripps Prize for best first book, reissued in 30th anniversary edition, Cornell, 2023, included in the 2015 Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009, David Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017), A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, 2021) and Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham, 2021: a collection of revised versions of her public writing since 2016).

Honig has also edited or co-edited several collections, including Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995), the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford, 2008), and Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford, 2016). Her articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Arethusa (Okin-Young Prize for best article in feminist theory), New Literary History, Political Theory, theory&event, Social Text, differences, American Political Science Review, Political Theology, and Cultural Critique.

Honig has been interviewed by The Nation and Polity in print and by several podcasts, including the Cogut Institute’s Meeting Street and Why We Argue.

In 2017-18 she served as the Inaugural Carl Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, and she is currently an affiliate of the Digital Democracy Group at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.