Hannah Landecker

Hannah Landecker is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA. She is the author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard University Press, 2007), and numerous works on the moving image in the biological sciences. Her research interests are the social and historical study of biotechnology and life science, from 1900 to the present. She was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University through 2008. Recently, her research interests have centered on the historical and social study of metabolism. Her current study, American Metabolism, looks at transformations to the metabolic sciences wrought by the rise of epigenetics, microbiomics, cell signaling and hormone biology. A related project concerns the history of metabolic hormones after 1960 and the rise of the cellular “signal” as a central category of thought and practice in the life sciences. She was a collaborator on UCLA’s Life Un(Ltd) project and a co-organizer in its intellectual vision.