David J. Hess

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David J. Hess is an American anthropologist and professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville , Tennessee .

Education and career

Hess holds both an MA (1983) and Ph.D. (1987) from Cornell University in the field of anthropology with a focus on Latin American studies. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1978 . After he was Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University from 1987 to 1989 , he was appointed to the Science and Technology Studies Department of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1989 to 2011 and has been working in Nashville since 2011.

Focus

He began to apply anthropological field study methods to religion and popular science publications. Using the example of the conflicts over a possible bacterial cause for cancer, he described the interaction between the public and various heterodox fields of research, also with regard to religious and social movements.

In the meantime, his main focus is on industrial transitions, sustainability research and the current stalemate in the transition to a more sustainable economy. He is currently at the Institute for Energy and Environment as Director, Program on Environmental and Sustainability Studies.

Awards

Hess has received two Fulbright Fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation , the National Institutes of Health , and FIPSE and has been awarded the Robert K. Merton Prize, the Diana Forsythe Prize, the Star-Nelkin Prize and the William H. Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award.

Publications (excerpt)

  • Spirits and scientists. Ideology, spiritism, and Brazilian culture. 1991
  • Science in the New Age. Monograph on scientific and cultural aspects of the New Age movement in the US University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, The Chinese edition was published in 1998 by Jiangxi Education Press
  • Samba in the Night Fieldwork account of the religious movement in Brazil known as “Spiritism”. Columbia University Press, 1994
  • Science and Technology in a Multicultural World. An exploration of various approaches to the culture concept in science and technology studies. Columbia University Press, 1995
  • Can Bacteria Cause Cancer? History and politics of an alternative pathway in cancer research. New York University Press, 1997
  • To tell the truth. On Scientific Counterpublics. In: Public Understanding of Science. Volume 20, No. 5, 2011, pp. 627-641.
  • With Jonathan Coley: Green Energy Laws and Republican Legislators in the United States. In: Energy Policy . Volume 48, No. 1, 2012, pp. 576-583.
  • Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy. MIT Press, Cambridge 2012.
  • Industrial Fields and Countervailing Power. The Transformation of Distributed Solar Energy in the United States. In: Global Environmental Change . Volume 23, No. 5, 2013

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Review of David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993 , by Seymour Mauskopf in the British Journal for the History of Science. Volume 28, No. 3, September 1995, pp. 369-370, DOI: 10.1017 / S0007087400033343

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hess, David J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century