Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson
Born	Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.
Alma mater	University of California, San Diego New York University
Occupation	Dean of Social Science; Professor of Sociology and former Director, Institute for Research on Women Gender, and Sexuality; Author
Employer	Columbia University
Known for	Science and Technology Studies; Sociology; African American Studies
Website
Alondra Nelson at Columbia University Alondra Nelson's Website

Alondra Nelson is an award-winning American academic and writer. She is a professor of sociology and gender studies and the inaugural Dean of Social Science ^[1] at Columbia University in the City of New York. She is former Director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.^[2] She is also the first African American to be tenured in the Department of Sociology at Columbia.

Personal life

Born in Bethesda, Maryland, she was raised in San Diego, California.

In 2000, she married Ben Williams, an editor at New York Magazine. They later divorced. She was romantically linked to Harvard University Law professor Randall Kennedy.

Career

She earned a B.A. in Anthropology (magna cum laude) from the University of California at San Diego in 1994. At UCSD, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University in 2003.

From 2003-2009, she was Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Studies and Sociology at Yale University,^[3][4] where she was the recipient of the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.^[5] At Yale, Nelson was the first Black woman to join the Department of Sociology faculty.

Nelson has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. She serves on the editorial boards of Social Studies of Science and Social Text.

Writings

Nelson writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and African diasporic experience.^[6][7] Named one of "13 Notable Blacks In Technology" By Black Voices,^[8] she established the Afrofuturism on-line community in 1998 and edited an eponymous special issue of the journal Social Text in 2002.^[9] She is also co-editor, with Thuy Linh Tu, of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, one of the first scholarly works to examine the racial politics of contemporary technoculture.^[10][11] Her writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe,^[12] The Guardian (London) and The Chronicle of Higher Education,^[13] among other publications.

Nelson's writing deals with the intersection of technology, culture, and new media, and how these lenses can be used to address the continuing impacts of African Diaspora. She is among a small group of critical theorists studying and discussing Afrofuturism, an emerging theoretical and cultural aesthetic. Particularly, her essay Future Texts lends insight to the inequitable access to technologies between whites and blacks. She writes, "Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress." ^[14] Nelson explores the way artists and writers have adopted older forms of technology and retrofitted them to promote a black aesthetic.

Awards and Fellowships

Nelson has won several awards over the course of her career. Her book, Body and Soul, received the Mirra Komarovsky Award, the Letita Woods Brown Award, the Best Book Award from the Association from Humanist Sociology and the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award (Section on Race, Class and Gender). This book was also a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award.

In 2013, Nelson received the Just Wellness Award from the Third Root Community Health Center for writing Body and Soul, a "work at the nexus of healing and social justice." ^[15]

Nelson is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is also a member of the Council on Big Data, Ethics, and Society and serves as advisor to the Data and Society Research Institute.

Bibliography

Books

• 2001. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York University Press, ed. with Thuy Linh Tu ISBN 0-8147-3604-1.
• 2002. Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text. Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-6545-6.
• 2011. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-8166-7648-8.
• 2012. Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History. Rutgers University Press, ed. with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee, ISBN 0-8135-5255-9.

Articles and Book Chapters

• 1997. Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh Tu, Debra Wexler Rush and Alicia Headlam Hines. ‘Communities on the verge: Intersections and disjunctures in the new information order.’ Computers and Composition, 14(2), 289-300.
• 2000. 'Afrofuturism: Past Future Visions,' Colorlines
• 2006. ‘A Black Mass as Black Gothic: Myth and Bioscience in Black Cultural Nationalism.’ In Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Crawford (eds.), New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-3695-2.
• 2007. Lundy, Braun, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, et al. ‘Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?’. PLoS: Medicine 4(9): 1423-28.
• 2007. Deborah Bolnick, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, et al. ‘The Business and Science of Genetic Ancestry Testing,’ Science 318 (5849): 399-400.
• 2008. ‘The Factness of Diaspora.’ In Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (eds.) Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• 2008. ‘Bio Science: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry’. Social Studies of Science 38 (5): 759-783.
• 2009. Adele E. Clarke, Janet Shim, Sara Shostak and Alondra Nelson. 'Biomedicalising genetic health, diseases and identities.' The Handbook of Genetics & Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era. London: Routledge.
• 2011. Alondra Nelson and Jeong Won Hwang. 'Roots and Revelation: Genetic Ancestry Tracing and the YouTube Generation.' In Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (eds.) Race After the Internet New York: Routledge, 271-290.
• 2013. Alondra Nelson. 'DNA Ethnicity as Black Social Action?' 'Cultural Anthropology 28 (3): 527-536.
• 2014. Alondra Nelson and Joan H. Robinson. ‘The Social Life of DTC Genetics.’ In Daniel Lee Kleinman and Kelly Moore (eds.) Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society. London: Routledge.

References

External links

• Alondra Nelson
• Alondra Nelson, Department of Sociology, Columbia University
• Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University
• Afrofuturism