My Biography
Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and (by courtesy) Anthropology at Stanford, and Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at Wits University (South Africa). She spent 18 years at the University of Michigan, directing dissertations in its Program in Anthropology and History; she also helped to found and direct its Program in Science, Technology, and Society and its African Studies Center. Hecht has served as visiting scholar at universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. She holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT.
Residual Governance received two 2024 PROSE awards from the Association for American Publishers, for Government and Politics and for Excellence in Social Science. Hecht’s books include Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT & Wits UP, 2012) and The Radiance of France (MIT, 1998/2nd ed. 2009). Translated into nine languages, her publications have received awards in the fields of science & technology studies (STS), African studies, history of technology, European history, sociology, and anthropology.
Hecht’s current project, Inside-Out Earth, examines the cumulative wastes of energy at four frontlines of planetary change: Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic; Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Mpumalanga, South Africa; and the Atacama desert in northern Chile. Seen from these places, energy systems and their wastes are accumulating—not, as fervently proclaimed in wealthy nations, “transitioning.” In collaboration with colleagues in each place, as well as with photographer Potšišo Phasha, Inside-Out Earth asks how residual governance operate on these frontlines, and how people live with (and in) the resulting wastes.