Dear Staff and the Class of 2017-18,

Please join me in welcoming guest speaker Alondra Nelson for the last seminar of the academic year, entitled, “The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality.” The talk will be held in the Library on Wednesday, May 23rd, from 11 AM to 12.30 PM.

Alondra Nelson is President of the Social Science Research Council. She is also a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science.

Nelson is author most recently of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, which was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Foundation Award for Best Nonfiction. Her books also include Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, which was recognized with several honors, including the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award and the C. Wright Mills Award (Finalist), as well as Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee) and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh Tu). In 2002, Nelson edited “Afrofuturism,” an influential special issue of Social Text, drawing on contributions from members of a synonymous online community she established in 1998. She is currently at work on a book about science and technology policy in the Obama administration.

Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. She has been a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, the Bavarian American Academy, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

I hope everyone is looking forward—as I am—to what will no doubt be an interesting and productive discussion.