Stefan Helmreich

Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology

Room E53-335Q

617-253-9343

Biography

Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics, and computer science define and theorize their objects of study, particularly as these objects — waves, life, sound, code — reach their conceptual limits. A Book of Waves (Duke University Press, 2023) details how scientists at sea and in the lab monitor and model ocean waves, seeking to capture in technical language these forces of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. The book includes reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist and queer theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, and cosmology. Helmreich’s previous ethnography, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty. Winner of the 2017 J.I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research, the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science, the 2010 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society, and the 2010 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from Society for Cultural Anthropology, the book charts how marine microbes are entangled with debates about the origin of life, climate change, property in the ocean commons, and the possibility of life on other worlds. An earlier book, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998) is an ethnography of computer modeling in the life sciences. It won the 2000 Diana Forsythe Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that asks after changing definitions of life, water, and sound (and features a soundtrack) and won the 2016 Michelle Kendrick Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts. What Is Life?, co-edited with Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, and Michael Rossi, is an art+science book that reproduces pages from key texts in the history of biology, interleaving these with essays that ask what the category of “life” has meant to biologists. Helmreich received his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and prior to coming to MIT held postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell, Rutgers, and NYU. In 2018, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, Cabinet, The Wire, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Public Culture.

Research

anthropology of science and technology, with an emphasis on biology; social studies of race, gender, kinship, sexuality, ability and science; ethnography of information science; maritime and oceanic anthropology; multispecies ethnography; social and cultural studies of sound and the senses

Selected Publications

2023	A Book of Waves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2022	What Is Life? Biogroop (Stefan Helmreich, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, and Michael Rossi), eds. in association with Katrin Klingan und Nick Houde. Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet), Volume 11. Leipzig: Spector Books. In English and German editions: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2021/das_neue_alphabet_publikationsreihe/das_neue_alphabet_titel/publikation_what_is_life_das_neue_alphabet.php.
2021	On Oceanography: Armen Avanessian, Werner Boschmann, and Karen Sarkisov in dialogue with Stefan Helmreich. In XXI Century Science: Oceanography: Marine Monitoring, Microbiology, and Materiality. Armen Avanessian, Werner Boschmann, and Karen Sarkisov, eds. Pp. 7-21. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
2021	Flipping the Ship: Ocean Waves, Media Orientations, and Objectivity at Sea. Media and Environment, May. https://doi-org.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/10.1525/001c.21389.
2020	The Shape of Epidemics (with David Shumway Jones). Boston Review, June 26, http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/david-s-jones-stefan-helmreich-shape-epidemics
2020	Wave Theory ~ Social Theory. Public Culture 32(2):287-325
2017	The Genders of Waves. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 45(1&2): 29-51.
2016	Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, with co-authored contributions from Sophia Roosth and Michelle Friedner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. eBook features color images. Audio/music examples at https://soundcloud.com/user-671277267/sets/sounding-the-limits-of-life-essays-in-the-anthropology-of-biology-and-beyond.
2016	Gravity's Reverb: Listening to Space-Time, or Articulating the Sounds of Gravitational-Wave Detection. Cultural Anthropology 31(4): 464-492.
2014	Homo microbis: The Human Microbiome, Figural, Literal, Political. Thresholds 42: 52-59.
2014	The Perils and Promises of Microbial Abundance: Novel Natures and Model Ecosystems, from Artisanal Cheese to Alien Seas (with Heather Paxson). Social Studies of Science 44(2):165-193.
2013	Potential Energy and the Body Electric: Cardiac Waves, Brain Waves, and the Making of Quantities into Qualities. Cultural Anthropology 54, Supplement 7: 139-148.
2012	Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner). The Senses & Society 7(1):72-86.
2011	From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures. In "Image as Action, Image in Action," special issue of Social Research 78(4):1211-1242.
2011	What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies. Critical Inquiry 37(4):671-696.
2011	Nature/Culture/Seawater. American Anthropologist 113(1):132-144.
2010	The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography (with S. Eben Kirksey, co-editor of special issue on "Multispecies Ethnography"). Cultural Anthropology 25(4):545-575.
2010	Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth). Representations 112:27-53.
2009	Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Teaching

21A.859J / STS.250J
Social Theory and Analysis

Major theorists and theoretical schools since the late 19th century. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Bourdieu, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Foucault, Gramsci, and others. Key terms, concepts, and debates.

21A.319J / STS.330J
History and Anthropology of Medicine and Biology

Co-taught with Dr. David Jones.
Explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics might include interaction of disease and society; science, colonialism, and international health; impact of new technologies on medicine and the life sciences; neuroscience and psychiatry; race, biology and medicine. Specific emphasis varies from year to year.

21A.103J / STS.046J / WGS.225J
The Science of Race, Sex, and Gender

Co-taught with Dr. Abha Sur.
Examines the role of science and medicine in the origins and evolution of the concepts of race, sex, and gender from the 17th century to the present. Focus on how biological, anthropological, and medical concepts intersect with social, cultural, and political ideas about racial, sexual, and gender difference in the US and globally. Approach is historical and comparative across disciplines emphasizing the different modes of explanation and use of evidence in each field.

21A.505J / STS.065J
The Anthropology of Sound

Examines the ways humans experience sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. Consider how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across sociocultural and scientific contexts. Learn how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally as well as the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, sound recording, and the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of sound ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the digital age are also addressed.

21A.507J / 4.648J (meets with 21A.519/4.649)
Resonance: Sonic Experience, Science, and Art

Examines the sonic phenomena and experiences that motivate scientific, humanistic, and artistic practices. Explores the aesthetic and technical aspects of how we hear: measure or describe vibrations; record, compress, and distribute resonating materials; and how we ascertain what we know about the world through sound. Although the focus is on sound as an aesthetic, social, and scientific object, the subject also investigates how resonance is used in the analysis of acoustics, architecture, and music theory. Students make a sonic artifact or research project as a final requirement. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Co-taught with Professor Caroline Jones.

21A.504J / STS.086J / WGS.276J
Cultures of Computing

Examines computers anthropologically, as artifacts revealing the social orders and cultural practices that create them. Students read classic texts in computer science along with cultural analyses of computing history and contemporary configurations. Explores the history of automata, automation and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; robots, cyborgs, and artificial life; creation and commoditization of the personal computer; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; hackers and gamers; technobodies and virtual sociality. Emphasis is placed on how ideas about gender and other social differences shape labor practices, models of cognition, hacking culture, and social media.

Awards

2018-19	John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
2018-19	Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
2017	J.I. Staley Prize, School for Advanced Research, for Alien Ocean
2016	Michelle Kendrick Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, for Sounding the Limits of Life
2016	Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising, MIT
2012	Rachel Carson Book Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science, for Alien Ocean
2010	American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize, American Anthropological Association, for Alien Ocean
2010	Gregory Bateson Book Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, for Alien Ocean
2010	Institute for Advanced Studies Distinguished Fellowship, Durham University, and Prowse Fellowship, Van Mildert College, Durham, United Kingdom
2009	Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant to fund a 2010-2011 Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures entitled "Sensing the Unseen"(with Heather Paxson)
2009	James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, MIT
2006	MIT's James A. and Ruth Levitan Research Prize in the Humanities

News

Stefan Helmreich’s new book examines the many facets of oceanic wave science and the propagation of wave theory into other areas of life.

Peter Dizikes | MIT News

August 30, 2023

Ocean waves are easy on the eyes, but hard on the brain. How do they form? How far do they travel? How do they break? Those magnificent waves you see crashing into the shore are complex.

“I’ve often asked this question,” the eminent wave scientist Walter Munk told MIT Professor Stefan Helmreich several years ago. “If we met somebody from another planet who had never seen waves, could [they] dream about what it’s like when a wave becomes unstable in shallow water? About what it would do? I don’t think so. It’s a complicated problem.”

Flipping the Ship: Ocean Waves, Media Orientations, and Objectivity at Sea

Stefan Helmreich | Media+Environment | Image: Stefan Helmreich

June 11, 2021

This article offers an anthropologically informed media studies account of work on The FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), as the author reports on working ethnographically alongside wave scientists in this Escheresque environment, a setting that often sees scientists shifting between aspirations to steady objectivism and moments of fleeting but motivating wonder. Placing FLIP in a longer history of physical oceanography, the author also argues that what wave scientists take ocean waves to be has been strongly imprinted by the techniques and technologies—mathematics, photography, spectral analysis, wave tanks—through which waves have been studied and come to be known.

Teaching With Digital Technology Award winners recognized for their innovations

MIT Open Learning

August 3, 2020

Graham Jones and Stefan Helmreich are two of the thirty-one MIT instructors awarded.

Perspectives on the Societal Impact of Computing and AI

February 27, 2019

At the invitation of SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles, Professors Susan Silbey, Heather Paxson, and Stefan Helmreich were asked to offer their perspectives on the "societal and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies".

Professor Stefan Helmreich is selected to be a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute

May 10, 2018

Professor Stefan Helmreich has been selected as 2018-2019 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. He will be working on his current manuscript which is an "ethnographic account of how scientists measure, model, and monitor ocean waves in an era of climate change".

Professor Stefan Helmreich is awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship

May 10, 2018

Professor Stefan Helmreich joins a diverse group of scholars, scientists, and artists who have been acknowledged for their prior achievements and exceptional promise.

Professor Stefan Helmreich's latest fieldwork takes place on the FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform) ship

February 14, 2018

Professor Stefan Helmreich's research takes him aboard the FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform) ship to interview oceanographic scientists about contemporary wave science.