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Talia Dan-Cohen is an anthropologist of science and technology with interests that range across the history, philosophy, and social studies of science. She has conducted extensive research on the technological frontiers of the biosciences. Her more recent research questions complexity as an epistemic virtue.
Her book, A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments (Cornell University Press, 2021), approaches the field of synthetic biology by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of practitioners in two lab at Princeton University. In these sites, Dan-Cohen examines the set of techno-epistemic practices that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life their distinctive contemporary forms. She is also the co-author of A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicle (Princeton University Press 2005, with Paul Rabinow). Dan-Cohen is currently working on a new book, entitled The Limits of Complexity, which examines the histories, uses, and abuses of complexity across several fields.
Selected Publications
Books:
2021 A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2005 A Machine to Make A Future: Biotech Chronicles, with Paul Rabinow. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Articles:
"What Ever Happened to the Anthropology of Science?" Annual Review of Anthropology (accepted) - coauthored with Nicolas Langlitz
"An Entire Career in 10 Seconds': On AI in Protein Chemistry" Biosocieties (in press)
2024 "Experimental Artifacts." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 75, no. 1: 253-274. - coauthored with Carl Craver
2021 "The Future." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11, no. 2: 754-756
2020 "I Heart Complexity." Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 4: 709-727
2020 "Tracing Complexity: The Case of Archaeology." American Anthropologist
2019 "Writing Thin." Anthropological Quarterly 92(3): 903-917.
2017 “Epistemic Artifacts: On the Uses of Complexity in Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(2): 285-301.
2016 “Ignoring Complexity: Epistemic Wagers and Knowledge Practices Among Synthetic Biologists.” Science, Technology and Human Values 41(5): 899-921.
