Yale Sociology » Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson

Office Location : 81 Wall Street

Phone : 203-432-1176

Vita : download PDF
Card : download vCard

Assistant Professor of Sociology, African American Studies and American Studies

Alondra Nelson’s (PhD. New York University, 2003) research and teaching interests include the historical and socio-cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine; racial formation processes in biomedicine and technoculture; social movements; and social and cultural theory.

She is co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 2001) and is currently completing Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Race and Health, a book about African American advocacy around issues of genetic disease, medicalized models of social unrest, and health disparities. Her current research is an ethnographic study of traditional and genetic “root-seeking” and the implications of these practices for contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, diaspora, ancestry, and memory.

Professor Nelson’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, and Ford Foundations. She has been a fellow at BIOS: Research Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics, the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University, and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.

Recent Publications

Books

Nelson, Alondra (ed.) (2002). Afrofuturism (A Special Issue of Social Text). Durham: Duke University Press.
Nelson, Alondra and Thuy Linh N. Tu (eds.) (2001). Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press.

Chapters

Nelson, Alondra (2008). ‘The Factness of Diaspora’, in Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (eds.) Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Rutgers University Press.
Nelson, Alondra (2006). ‘A Black Mass as Black Gothic: Myth and Medicine in African American Cultural Nationalism,’ in Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Crawford (eds.), New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. Rutgers University Press.
Nelson, Alondra and Thuy Linh N. Tu (2001). ‘Hidden Circuits: An Introduction’ in Nelson, Tu and Hines (eds.) Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press.

Articles

Clarke, Adele E., Janet Shim, Sara Shostak and Alondra Nelson (2009). ‘Biomedicalizing Genetic Health, Diseases and Identities,’ in Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner, and Margaret Lock (eds.), Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era. London: Routledge.
Nelson, Alondra (2009). ‘The Inclusion and Difference Paradox: A Review of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research,’ Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.
Nelson, Alondra (2008). ‘Bio Science: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry,’ Social Studies of Science, special issue--Race, Genetics, and Disease: Questions of Evidence, Questions of Consequence.
Bolnick, Deborah, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, et al. (2007). ‘The Business and Science of Ancestry Testing,’ Science 318 (5849): 399-400.
Braun, Lundy, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, et al. (2007). ‘Racial categories in medical practice: How useful are they?’ Public Library of Science (PLoS): Medicine 4(9): 1423-1428.