Sophia Roosth is an anthropologist who writes about the contemporary life sciences. From 2020-2021, she will be a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.
Roosth was the 2016 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and in 2013-2014 she was the Joy Foundation Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and a predoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She earned her PhD in 2010 in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Books
Synthetic: How Life Got Made
In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age.
Academic Writing
“Turning to stone: Fossil hunting and coeval estrangement in Montana”
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, Vol. 69-70, Spring-Autumn (2018)
“Nineteen Hertz and Below: An Infrasonic History of the Twentieth Century”
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Vol. 5.3 (2018)
”The little things in life”
BioSocieties, Vol. 12.2 (2017)
“Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology”
Grey Room, Vol. 57 (2014)
“Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy”
American Anthropologist, Vol. 115.1 (2013)
“Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication”
Science in Context, Vol. 26.1 (2013)
“Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley: Living Tissues, Wooly Textiles, Theoretical Biologies”
differences, Vol. 23.3 (2012), featured in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture
“Feminist Theory Out of Science: Introduction”
with Astrid Schrader, differences, Vol. 23.2 (2012)
“Life Forms: A Keyword Entry”
with Stefan Helmreich, Representations, Vol. 112.1 (2010), republished in Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond
“Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities”
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35 (2009)
Popular Writing
“Analysis: Synthesis”
e-flux (2017)
”Virus, Coal, and Seed: Subcutaneous Life in the Polar North”
Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2016)
“Ruin”
“Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen,” Cultural Anthropology (2016)
“The Godfather, Part II”
Science, Vol. 342.6156 (2013)