Frédéric Keck, 2023 USC Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor

Monday, April 10, 2023
12:00-1:30pm PST
Location TBD

Please RSVP to reserve your lunch. 

Frédéric Keck of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales will be the 2022–23 Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor at USC, in residence starting March 2023. Frédéric Keck is Professor (directeur de recherche) at the CNRS, affiliated with the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale at the EHESS. Keck studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. He has published on the history of French anthropology in its relations with philosophy, particularly Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, Bergson, and Lévi-Strauss. 

Keck’s work sits at the crossroads of the history of science, the sociology of risk and the anthropology of nature, with particular interests in standards of "biosecurity" applied to humans and animals and to the forms of anticipation they produce with regard to health and ecological disasters. After joining the CNRS in 2005, Keck carried out ethnographic surveys on health crises linked to animal diseases: BSE, SARS, “avian” and “swine” flu.  He was a laureate of the Fyssen Foundation in 2007, a CNRS bronze medalist in 2011, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 2015, and served as head of the research and teaching department of the musée du quai Branly (2014-2018) and director of the Social Anthropology Laboratory (2019-2020).

This event is co-sponsored by the USC Levan Institute for the Humanities, the USC Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and the USC Department of Anthropology.