Anthony Ryan Hatch is a sociologist whose teaching and scholarship examine questions about science, technology, and inequality. His specific areas of specialization are science and technology studies, medical humanities, and political sociology. His new book, Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), examines how a new biomedical concept called “metabolic syndrome” constitutes a new way for scientists to study and treat metabolic health problems like diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, a way of reproducing biological and genetic concepts of race and ethnicity, and a political strategy that obscures how institutionalized racisms shape human metabolism. Recent media interviews about Blood Sugar on RisingUpWithSonali.com with Sonali Kolhatkar and listen to the audio of my recent interview on Information is the Best Medicine with Glenn Ellis. Blood Sugar has been excerpted in The Scientist Magazine, a periodical for life scientists, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

For Fall 2017, Professor Hatch is Faculty Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities under the theme “Rethinking Necropolitics.” His current project focuses on the uses and meanings of psychotropic drugs in institutionalized mental health care settings in the United States. This project is tentatively titled “Silent Cells: Psychotropics and Institutionalized Life.”

His research is published in Radical History Review, Issues in Race and Society; Criminal Justice Studies; Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society; Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism; 50 Years After Deinstititutionalization: Mental Illness in Contemporary Communities. You can watch his 2016 Wesleyan Thinks Big talk, titled On Serving Others: Labor and Justice in the New Gilded Age and read his Faculty Reflection at Wesleyan’s 2017 Senior Voices (Baccalaureate).

Professor Hatch’s courses include Cultural Studies of Health, Metabolism and Technoscience, Life and Death: Relations of Biopower and Necropower, Antipsychiatry, TechnoPrisons: Corrections, Technology, and Society; Black Pheonix Rising: Death and Ressurection in Black Lives. 

Professor Hatch earned his AB in Philosophy at Dartmouth College and his MA and PhD in Sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park. He spent years working in community-based public health research at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.