Social Science Research Council

Janet Browne
2008 DPDF Research Director
Animal Studies

Janet Browne is Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Professor Browne earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Imperial College, London in 1978. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Professor Browne was a graduate tutor and arranged workshops for presentation skills, thesis-writing, time management, and proposal writing. While her interests range widely over the history of life sciences and natural history, Professor Browne specializes in reassessing Charles Darwin’s work. Professor Browne is the author of a major biographical study that integrated Darwin’s science with his life and times: Charles Darwin: Voyaging Volume One (London, 1996) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place Volume Two (London, 2002). Professor Browne was also awarded the Founder’s Medal from the Society for the History of Natural Science for marking “a substantial contribution to the study of history or bibliography of natural history” (2003).

Harriet Ritvo
2008 DPDF Research Director
Animal Studies

Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Ritvo received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975. She currently teaches courses in British history, environmental history, and the history of natural science. Professor Ritvo is the author of The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard University Press, 1987), and The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and the Victorian Environment (University of Chicago Press, under contract). Professor Ritvo’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Stanford Humanities Center. In 1990, she received a Whiting Writers Award.

Sheila Jasanoff
2008 DPDF Research Director
Critical Studies of Science and Technology Policy

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Professor Jasanoff held academic positions at Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Kyoto, and Cornell where she founded and chaired the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She earned her Ph.D. (1973) in Linguistics as well as her JD (1976) from Harvard University. Her research includes the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and public policy of modern democracies, with particular focus on the regulation of biotechnology and the environment in the United States, Europe, and India. Professor Jasanoff is the author of Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, 2005), Science at the Bar: Law, Science and Technology in America (Cambridge, 1995), and The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, 1990). Professor Jasanoff has also served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society of Social Studies of Science.

Clark Miller
2008 DPDF Research Director
Critical Studies of Science and Technology Policy

Clark Miller is Associate Professor with joint appointments in Political Science and the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Professor Miller received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1996. His research and teaching focus on the institutional and constitutional organization of global governance, with particular emphasis on the politics of knowledge and ideas in international institutions and regimes. His current research project compares knowledge-making and norm-making surrounding global security in the IMF, WHO, and International Atomic Energy Agency. Professor Miller is the author of numerous articles including “The Globalization of Human Affairs: A Reconsideration of Science, Political Economy, and World Order” in Rethinking Global Political Economy: Emerging Issues, Unfolding Odysseys (New York, 2003) and “Knowledge and Accountability in Global Governance: Justice on the Biofrontier” in Partial Truths: Feminist Approaches to Social Movements, Community, and Power, Volume 2 (Richmond, 2003).

Tom P. Evans
2008 DPDF Research Director
Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

Tom P. Evans is Associate Professor of Geography and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Evans received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1998. His research areas include human-environment interactions, human dimensions of global change, land use/land cover analysis and modeling, decisions-making, institutions, natural resource management, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Professor Evans is a contributing author of numerous publications including “Agent-Based Modeling of Deforestation in Southern Yucatan, Mexico, and Reforestation in the Midwest United States” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (in press), “Spatial Patterns of Ownership Parcelization in South-Central Indiana, 1928-1997” in Landscape and Urban Planning (in press), and “Spatially Explicit Experiments for the Exploration of Land Use Decision-Making Dynamics” in International Journal of Geographic Information Science (2006).

Brent Yarnal
2008 DPDF Research Director
Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

Brent Yarnal is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Integrated Regional Assessment at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Yarnal earned his Ph.D. in Geography from Simon Fraser University in 1982. His current research interests include climate variation and change, land-use/land-cover change, natural hazards, and, more specifically, the interaction of environmental hazards, global environment change, and socioeconomic development. Professor Yarnal has authored numerous articles, including  most recently  “Why Worry? Community Water System Managers’ Perceptions of Climate Vulnerability” in Global Environmental Changes (Yarnal et.al.,Global Environmental Change 17  (2007): 228-237),  and "Vulnerability and All That Jazz: Addressing Vulnerability in New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina” in Technology in Society"  (Technology in Society 29 (2007): 249-255).

Charles Kurzman
2008 DPDF Research Director
Muslim Modernities

Charles Kurzman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Kurzman earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. Before joining the faculty at UNC, Chapel Hill, Professor Kurzman was a Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study School of Historical Studies (Princeton) as well as an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. He is the author of Democracy Denied, 1905-1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Constitutional Revolution (Cambridge, forthcoming in 2008) and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, 2004). Professor Kurzman is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants including, the National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics Program (2008-2010) and the American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (2002).

Bruce B. Lawrence
2008 DPDF Research Director
Muslim Modernities

Bruce B. Lawrence (Carnegie Scholar, 2008) is Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion and Director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center at Duke University. He has also held numerous visiting professor positions at Dartmouth College, Oxford University, University of Chicago, and Islamic State University, Jakarta. Professor Lawrence received his Ph.D. in History of Religions: Islam and Hinduism from Yale University in 1972. His research ranges from institutional Islam to Indo-Persian Sufism and also encompasses the comparative study of religious movements. Professor Lawrence’s recent publications include The Qur’an: A Biography (New York, 2006), New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (New York, 2002), and Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Africa and Beyond (New York, 2002), among many others.

M. Christine Boyer
2008 DPDF Research Director
Urban Visual Studies

M. Christine Boyer is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. Professor Boyer earned her Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. Professor Boyer is an urban historian whose interests include the history of the American city, city planning, preservation planning, and computer science. Before joining the faculty at Princeton, she was a professor and chair of the City and Regional Planning Program at Pratt Institute. She has also taught at Columbia and University of Pennsylvania. Professor Boyer is the author of Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning 1890-1945 (Cambridge, 1983), Manhattan Matters: Architecture and Style 1850-1900 (New York, 1985), The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge, 1994), and Cybercities (New York, 1996).

Edward Dimendberg
2008 DPDF Research Director
Urban Visual Studies

Edward Dimendberg holds joint appointments as Associate Professor in Film & Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine. He also has taught at Michigan, Columbia, UCLA, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and was a Sponsoring Editor in the Humanities at the University of California Press. Professor Dimendberg received his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1992. His research interests include cinema, architecture, urbanism, modernism, and modernity. Professor Dimendberg is the author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2004) and is a co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (University of California Press, 1994). In 2004, Professor Dimendberg was invited to become the first Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and to commission reviews of films, DVDs, and websites.