Adriana Petryna named Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology

Adriana Petryna, who directs the MD/PhD program in Anthropology at Penn in conjunction with Penn’s Medical Scientist Training Program, has been named the Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology.

In her anthropological studies in the U.S., Europe, and Brazil, Petryna focuses on the socio-political nature of science, how populations are enrolled in experimental knowledge-production, and what becomes of citizenship and ethics in the process. Her concepts have advanced the social scientific study of environmental disasters, biomedical research and equity, and global health.

Petryna has written award-winning books, including Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects. She is co-editor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices and When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Her body of work was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems.

Her most recent book, Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change, examines the climate crisis through the lens of “horizoning,” a mode of reckoning that considers unnatural disasters against horizons of expectation within which people and societies can still act. Petryna takes readers inside the work of scientists and emergency responders as they grapple with rapid ecological change and craft operational footholds in combustible worlds.

A former Guggenheim Fellow, Petryna's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the School for Advanced Research. She has been a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.

The Francis E. Johnston Term Professorship was established through the bequest of G. Frederick Roll, W’34, and is named in honor of the late Francis E. Johnston, a biological anthropologist and emeritus professor of anthropology at Penn. Johnston completed his PhD at Penn in 1962 and served on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology for nearly four decades, as well as Department Chair from 1982 to 1994. He also founded the Netter Center for Community Partnerships’ Urban Nutrition Initiative, a project that has helped to improve community nutrition and wellness in West Philadelphia.