About Sharon Traweek

At UCLA I am an associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies, History, and Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies.

I have also been on the faculty of the Anthropology Department at Rice University and the Program in Anthropology & Archeology and to the Program in Science, Technology, & Society at MIT.  I have held visiting faculty positions at the Mt Holyoke Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, the Anthropology Department at the University of California at San Diego, the Program in Values, Technology, Science, and Society at Stanford University, and Sokendai, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, in Japan. 

My first book, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1988, paperback 1992), has remained in print and has been translated into Chinese (2003).

I received my Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

My recent book is Questing Excellence in Academia: A Tale of Two Universities (Routledge 2022), written in collaboration with Knut H. Sørensen (Professor emeritus, affiliated with the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture Centre for Technology and Society, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology.)

In 2020 I received the John Desmond Bernal Prize for “distinguished contributions to the field of STS” from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

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