Joseph P. Masco

(PhD, UC San Diego 1999) Associate Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College teaches and writes about science and technology, national security culture, political ecology, nuclear politics, mass media, and critical theory. His book The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), explores how the end of the Cold War challenged concepts of security and risk for the diverse communities working in and neighboring Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His current work examines the evolution of the national security state in the United States, with a particular focus on the interplay between affect, technology, and the public sphere in the articulation of threat.

E-mail: jmasco@uchicago.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications:

2006 The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton University Press.

• Co-Winner, 2006 Robert K. Merton Prize (Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology, American Sociology Association)
• Honorable Mention, 2007 John C. Cawelti Award (American Culture Association)

2006 5:29:45 AM. In I. Karp and C. Kratz, eds., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Duke University Press, 102-106.

2005 “Active Measures”, or How a KGB Spymaster Made Good in Post-9/11 America. Radical History Review 93: 285-300.

2005 The Billboard Campaign: The Los Alamos Study Group and the Nuclear Public Sphere. Public Culture. 17(3): 487-97. PDF

2005 A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From The Nevada Test Site to Liberace's 200-Pound Suit. In S. Harding and D. Rosenberg (eds.) Histories of the Future. Duke University Press, 19-49.

2004 Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Cultural Anthropology. 19(4): 517-550. PDF

2004 Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos. American Ethnologist. 31(3): 1-25.

2002 Lie Detectors: On Secrets and Hypersecurity in Los Alamos. Public Culture. 14(3): 441-467. PDF

1999 States of Insecurity: Plutonium and Post-Cold War Anxiety in New Mexico, 1992-96. In J. Weldes, M. Laffey, H. Gusterson, & R. Duval (eds.), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 203-231.

1996 Competitive Displays: Negotiating Genealogical Rights to the Potlatch at the American Museum of Natural History. American Anthropologist. 98(4): 837-852. PDF

1995 'It Is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance': Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, 1849-1922. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 37(1): 41-75. PDF