David Bates' current project explores the problem of "human insight" in the rationalist tradition. He is particularly interested in rhetorical conceptions of knowledge in Enlightenment scientific epistemology, in logic and science in 19th-century thought, and in theories of insight at the intersections of 20th-century psychology, philosophy of science, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence research.
Lawrence Cohen is Professor of Anthropology and (as of July 1, 2026) Chair of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Since 2014 he has been studying the impact of techniques of database deduplication on the politics, pragmatics, and distributed effects of emergent rationalities of citizenship, surveillance, and distribution of welfare and other forms of value. His focus has been India's Unique Identification Authority and its branded identity instrument, the Aadhaar number. Over the past few years he has extended this work to a range of different uses of deduplication, focusing on genealogy...
Elena Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, health, and the environment. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Elena was a history professor and the Mellon Fellow in Health and Humanities at Emory University, the Cain Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and an award-winning health columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She holds a PhD in history from UCSF (where she is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine), masters degrees in journalism and public health from Berkeley, and a bachelors...
Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society
Department of History
Associate Professor, Department of History Director, MEDS University of California, Berkeley
Sandra Eder works on the history of medicine with a specific focus on gender and sexuality, clinical practice, patient records, and the circulation of knowledge. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Making Gender: Sex, Body, and Norm in American Medicine and Science, which explores the development of our modern concept of gender within 1950s medical practices and American culture.
My research focuses on the anthropology of the biochemical sciences, global pharmaceutical politics, and postcolonial engagements with intellectual property and the politics of innovation and appropriation. These themes animated my 2003 book, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico, which examined the consequences of novel drug discovery partnerships linking global drug companies, Latin American research scientists, and indigenous communities. A key theme emerging from that work was how new deployments of the idioms of intellectual property serve as...
Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society
Department of History
Professor, Department of History Director, PhD Designated Emphasis in STS Director, OHST
Massimo Mazzotti's research interests lie at the intersection of the history of science and science studies. He is especially interested in the historicity and situatedness of mathematics, logic, and deductive reasoning, and in the social processes that can make them universally valid. He is also interested in using technological systems and artifacts as ways of entry for the explorations of specific forms of social organization and...
My research interests concern science, narrative and documentary; topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics and physics; and science, law and race. My latest book centers on the emergence of the so-called “scientific epic” as one among a set of possible frames or genres for synthesizing branches of knowledge according to a narrative, historical structure. Over the last several years, I have been involved in interrelated collaborative research projects, including studies of the genealogy and structure of technoscientific futurist imaginaries, the relationship between...
