Joshua Berson

Josh Berson’s career has been one of disciplinary and institutional arbitrage, guided by an abiding concern with the ecology of sentience and the evolution of culture. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, jointly supervised in History and Sociology of Science and Anthropology. He has held appointments, inter alia, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Berggruen Institute, where he was inaugural USC Berggruen Fellow in the Transformations of the Human. He is the author of The Human Scaffold (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), The Meat Question (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), and Computable Bodies (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

At the MPIWG Berson is pursuing two new projects, both departing from the concerns that animate the final third of The Human Scaffold. One will find expression in a work of more-or-less essay, the other in a work of more-or-less fiction, but both reflect Berson’s determination to leave the conventions of genre in a basket at the side of the road.