Symbionts and What is Life? | Dual Book Launch and Discussion with Caroline A. Jones, Stefan Helmreich, and Sophia Roosth
February 16
Sophia Roosth is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Roosth was the 2016 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the Joy Foundation Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2013-2014). She earned her PhD in 2010 in the HASTS Program at MIT. Roosth 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, e-flux, and Aeon. In her first book, Synthetic: How Life Got Made, Roosth asks what happens to “life” as a conceptual category when experimentation and fabrication converge. 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.