Short Bio
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, is a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a faculty affiliate in the History of Science Department. Her scholarship and teaching address questions of science, technology and medicine, focusing on the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. She is the author of two books on computer hackers and the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal into the cultures and politics of hacking. In 2022, she hosted the BBC4 radio and podcast series, The Hackers. She formerly held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and was an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
Long Bio
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is a full professor in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her scholarship covers the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. She is the author of two books on computer hackers: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014 and awarded the 2015 Diana Forsythe Prize by the American Anthropological Association.
She is currently working on a book about hackers and the state and is co-authoring with Matt Goerzen a paper on how hackers professionalized between the mid-1990s and 2000s, a project funded by the Ford Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and Fonds de Recherche du Québec. They also created a website and map of the project, which is called Where Warlocks Stay Up Late, and recently released a report. She is also the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal into the cultures and politics of hacking.
She writes for popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Slate, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Huffington Post, and the Atlantic, and has presented her work to numerous audiences, including the United States Congress's Congressional Internet Caucus, the Brookings Institution, the American Civil Liberties Union, and NASA. In 2022 she delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester. She formerly held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and was an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. In 2005, she received her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.