RICHARD FADOK

My name is Richard Fadok (“fey-dawk”). I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester, where I conduct anthropological research on architecture and human-nonhuman relations in the United States.

I was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Humanities Center and the Department of Anthropology, and a visiting researcher at the ASU Biodesign Institute. I have a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s in Biomedicine, Bioscience, and Society from the London School of Economics.

My background is multidisciplinary. Before I specialized in anthropology, I trained as a biologist, double majoring in Neuroscience and Science & Society at Brown University. My laboratory and clinical work focused on treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I was the only graduating senior to receive honors in both the natural and social sciences.

Alongside my academic research and teaching, I work in public scholarship as an assistant editor for Backchannels, the academic blog of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

I am also an advocate for animals. For the past two years, I have been a core member of the Multispecies Constitution Project and a volunteer consultant for the veterinary nonprofit Like a Dog, which provides vaccinations for community animals in Kolkata, India. I am also the founder of Smash the Crash, a student-and-faculty research initiative at the University of Rochester that studies bird-window collisions and pushes for bird-safe design. You can read about these and other activities on my events page.

Feel free to contact me! I welcome proposals to collaborate, invitations to speak, media inquiries, requests for copies of my publications and syllabi, and messages from past, present, and future students. I also welcome pitches for Backchannels. I am particularly interested in stories about design, biology, and the environment, as well as pedagogy.