Charles Thorpe, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Ph.D. - University of California, San Diego (Sociology), 2001

Charles Thorpe

Areas of Interest: Sociology of Science and Technology, Social and Political Theory, Intellectuals, Marxism, Culture, Ecology and Society

Thinkers I have written about and/or am particularly interested in:

Mikhail Bakunin, J. D. Bernal, Murray Bookchin, Guy Debord, Philip K. Dick, Norbert Elias, Jacques Ellul, Shumalith Firestone, John Bellamy Foster, Erich Fromm, R. D. Laing, Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, István Mészáros, Antonio Negri, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Michael Polanyi, Max Weber.

 

Email Address: cthorpe@ucsd.edu
Phone number: 858-534-0953
Office location: 497 Social Science Building

Office Hours

Classes to be taught in 2011/12:

Spring 2012

SOCI 131 - Sociology of Youth

SOCI 167 - Science and War

SOCG 234 - Intellectual Foundations of the Study of Science, Technology, and Medicine


 

Book:

Thorpe, Charles Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press. 2006.

Through a sociological biography of atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, this book examines the transformation of the social and political role of American scientists during World War Two and the Cold War.

 

Articles and Book Chapters:

"Participation as Post-Fordist Politics: Demos, New Labour, and Science Policy," Minerva 48(4) (2010): 389-411

(with Jane Gregory) “Producing the Post-Fordist Public: The Political Economy of Public Engagement with Science” Science as Culture 19(3) (September 2010): 273-301.

“Alienation as Death: Technology, Capital, and the Degradation of Everyday Life” Science as Culture 18 (3) (2009): 261-279.

“Community and the Market in Michael Polanyi’s Philosophy of Science,” Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009): 59-89.       

“A Splintered Function: Fate, Faith and the Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Metascience 17 (2008): 351-387. Review symposium on Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, with author response to reviews by Sheila Jasanoff, Michael Gordin, and Andrew Jewett.

     

“Capitalism, Audit, and the Demise of the Humanistic Academy,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 15 (September 2008). [add link to:

(with Ian Welsh) “Beyond Primitivism: Towards a Twenty-First Century Anarchist Theory and Praxis for Science and Technology,” Anarchist Studies 16 (1) (2008):