Biography
Short bio: Bruno Latour is now emeritus professor associated with the médialab and the program in political arts (SPEAP) of Sciences Po Paris. In addition to curating Critical Zones in ZKM (opening August 2020) he has also been, together with Martin Guinard, curator of the Taipeh Biennale of Art (opening October 2020).
Member of several academies, he is the recipient in 2013 of the Holberg Prize and of the Kyoto Prize in 2021. He has written and edited more than thirty books and published more than one hundred and fifty articles.
Long bio: Born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and from 2006 to 2017 at Sciences Po Paris where, from 2007 to 2013, he has been vice president for research.
After field studies in Africa and California he specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated into many studies in science policy and research management. He has written Laboratory Life (Princeton University Press), Science in Action, and The Pasteurization of France. He also published a field study on an automatic subway system Aramis or the love of technology and an essay on symmetric anthropology We have never been modern. He has also gathered a series of essays, Pandora's Hope:Essays in the Reality of Science Studies to explore the consequences of the " science wars". After having directed several thesis on various environmental crisis, he published a book on the political philosophy of the environment Politics of Nature (all of those books are with Harvard University Press and have been translated in many languages).
In a series of books, he has been exploring the consequences of science studies on different traditional topics of the social sciences: religion in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, and Rejoicing or the Torments of Religious Speech, and social theory in Paris ville invisible, a photographic essay on the technical & social aspects of the city of Paris. After a long field work on one of the French supreme Courts, he has published a monograph The Making of Law -an Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat. A new presentation of the social theory which he has developped with his colleagues in Paris is available at Oxford University Press, under the title: Reassembling the Social, an Introduction to Actor Network Theory. More and more interested by political ecology question he has published Facing Gaia eight lectures on the New Climatic Regime in 2015 and Down to Earth - Politics in the New Climatic Regime in 2018.
After having curated a major international exhibition in Karlsruhe at the ZKM center, Iconoclash beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, he has curated another one also with Peter Weibel Making Things Public The atmospheres of democracy in October 2005. He has curated Reset Modernity! (ZKM 2016). The three catalogs are with MIT Press.
While in Sciences Po, he has created the médialab to seize the chance offered to social theory by the spread of digital methods and has created (now directed by Dominique Cardon), together with Valrie Pihet a new experimental program in art and politics (SPEAP) now directed by Frédérique Ait-Touati.
Having been awarded and ERC grant to pursue an inquiry into modes of existence, he has been engaged from 2011 to 2014 in the AIME project, that is still going on.
Awards and Honors
- 1992: Bernal Prize awarded by the 4S Society.
- 1992: Prix Roberval du Livre et de la Communication grand public (for Aramis ou l’amour des techniques).
- 1996: Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Lund, Sweden.
- 2005: Is awarded the Spinoza Chair, University of Amsterdam, Spring 2005.
- 2006: Doctorate Honoris Causa, University of Lausanne.
- 2007: A one week international meeting held in Cerisy at the occasion of his 60th birthday.
- 2008: Doctorate Honoris Causa, University of Montreal.
- 2008: Medal of Honor Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna.
- 2008: Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass.
- 2008: Recipient of the Siegfried Unseld Prize for his life achievements (Frankfurt).
- 2008: Doctor Honoris causa of the University of Goteborg.
- 2009: Doctor Honoris causa of the University of Warwick.
- 2010: Recipient of the "Kulturpreiz" 2009 from the University of Munich.
- 2010: Recipient of the Nam June Paik Center Award.
- 2010: Recipient of the European Research Council Senior (ERC) grant for an inquiry into Modes of Existence (2011-2015).
- 2012: Is awarded the Legion of Honour.
- 2013: Has given the Gifford lectures on Natural Theology in Edinburgh in February 2013.
- 2013: Is awarded the Holberg Memorial Prize for 2013 (the closest equivalent of the Nobel Prize for humanities and social science).
- 2013: Has been invited to give the Tanner Lectures at Yale University in March 2014.
- 2014: Elected foreign correspondant of the Royal Academy of Belgium – section Technology and Society.
- 2015: Elected for five-years professor-at-large Cornell University.
- 2015: Albertus Magnus professor, University of Cologne June 2015.
- 2016: Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Edinburgh.
- 2017: Elected foreign correspondant of Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters section Social Sciences.
- 2018: Elected foreign correspondant of the British Academy.
- 2020: Spinoza Prize, Amsterdam.
- 2021: Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Leuwen.
- 2021: Kyoto Prize (considered as a sort of Nobel Prize for domains not covered by this prize).
Books About BL's Work
- Georg Kneer, Markus Schroer and Erhard Schüttpelz, Bruno Latours Kollektive. Kontroversen zur Entgrenzung des Sozialen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (2007).
- Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, de-press (2009).
- Reiner Ruffing, Bruno Latour, UTB Profile, Stuttgart (2009).
- Arno Bammé, Wissenschaft im Wandel. Bruno Latour als Symptom, Metropolis, (2008).
- Blok, Anders, and Torben Elgaard Jensen. Bruno Latour - Hybride Tanker I En Hybrid Verden. Hans Reitzels Forlag, Copenhagen, (2009). Blok, Anders and Jensen Torben Elgaard (2011) Bruno Latour: Hybrid thoughts in a hybrid world, London, Routledge.
- Schmidgen, Henning (2011) Bruno Latour zur Einführung, Berlin, Junius Verlag.
- Miller, A. S (2013) Speculative Grace. Bruno Latour and Object Oriented Theology, New York: Fordham University Press.
- McGee, Kyle (2013) Bruno Latour: The Normativity of Networks, London: Routledge.
- Schmigden, Henning (2014) Bruno Latour in Pieces, Fordham University Press
- Harman, Graham (2014). Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Political, London: Pluto Press.
- Lynch, Paul & Nathaniel Rivers (2015). Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Kyle McGee, (2015) Latour and the Passage of Law, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
- Lars Gertenbach (2015) Entgrenzungen der Soziologie. Bruno Latour und der Konstruktivismus, Velbrük Verlag.
- Gerard de Vries (2016) Bruno Latour, Polity Press, London (traduction française La Découverte, Paris, 2018).
- Henning Laux (editor) (2016) Bruno Latours Soziolgie der 'Existenzweisen'", Transcipt Verlag, Berlin.
- Felski, Rita, and Stephen Muecke, eds. Latour and the Humanities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.
- Desmond, Marilynn, and Noah Guynn, eds. We Have Always Been Medieval. Bruno Latour and Medieval Modes of Existence. Vol. 1112020.
- Frédérique Ait-Touati & Emanuelle Coccia, eds, Le cri de Gaïa, penser avec Bruno Latour, La Découverte, 2021
- Latour, Bruno, Daria Mangano, and Ilaria Ventura Bordenca. Politiche del Design. Semiotica degli artefatti e fore della socialità. Milano: Mimesis, 2021.
- Maniglier, Patrice. Le philosophe, la terre et le virus: Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité. Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021.
- Kleinherenbrink, Arjen. De constructie van de wereld.De filosofie van Bruno Latour. Amsterdam: Bloom, 2022.
- Albena Yaneva, Latour for architects, Routledge, 2022.
