Sophia Roosth

Sophia Roosth is an anthropologist who writes about contemporary life and earth sciences. She has published widely in journals including Critical Inquiry, Representations, Differences, American Anthropologist, Science, and Grey Room, as well as in popular venues such as Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Scientist, e-flux, and Aeon. She is the author of Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago 2017), an ethnography of synthetic biologists that documents the profound shifts biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Her next book, The Quick and the Dead, will offer a historically and ethnographically informed travelogue into the worlds of contemporary geobiologists, scientists seeking ancient microbial life-forms fossilized in stone.   Roosth is a Max Planck Society Sabbatical Award Laureate. Her work has also been supported by a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, as well as fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Before joining Gallatin, Roosth taught in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. She earned her PhD in 2010 in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).