Joseph P. Masco

(PhD, UC San Diego 1999) Associate Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College writes and teaches courses on science and technology, U.S. national security culture, political ecology, mass media, and critical theory. His first book, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), theorized the nuclear age by exploring 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 threat perception within a national public sphere.

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.

• Winner, 2008 Rachel Carson Prize (Society for the Social Studies of Science)
• Honorable Mention, 2007 John C. Cawelti Award (American Culture Association)
• Co-Winner, 2006 Robert K. Merton Prize (Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology, American Sociology Association)

(Forthcoming)  Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis. Social Studies of Science.

(Forthcoming) Counterinsurgency, The Spook, and Blowback. In John Kelly, Sean Mitchell, Beatrice Jauregui, and Jeremy Walton (eds.) Anthropology and Counterinsurgency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

(Forthcoming) Life Underground: Building the Bunker Society. Anthropology Now.

(Forthcoming) Atomic Health, Or How Nuclear Fear Shaped American Notions of Death. In Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland (eds.) Against Health. New York: New York University Press.

2008 Rehearsing the End at the Titan Missile Museum. On Site 20: 36-39. PDF

2008 Target Audience. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64(3): 23-31.

2008  "Survival is Your Business": Engineering Affect and Ruins in Nuclear America. Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 361-98.

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. PDF

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. PDF

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

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