Sarah Franklin


Sarah Franklin is an American anthropologist who has substantially contributed to the fields of feminism, gender studies, cultural studies and the social study of reproductive and genetic technology. She has conducted fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research. Her work combines both ethnographic methods and kinship theory, with more recent approaches from science studies, gender studies and cultural studies. In 2001 she was appointed to a Personal Chair in the Anthropology of Science, the first of its kind in the UK, and a field she has helped to create. She became Professor of Social Studies of Biomedicine in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics in 2004. In 2011 she was elected to the Professorship of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Education

Franklin is a graduate of Smith College from which she received a Distinguished Alumnae Award in 2011. She has an MA in Women's Studies from the University of Kent, an MA in Anthropology from New York University and a PhD from the University of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. She is one of the first anthropologists to undertake ethnographic research on new reproductive technologies.

Research

She has written and edited numerous books on reproductive and genetic technologies, as well as more than 150 articles, chapters, and reports. She has designed and led several major research projects addressing the social and cultural dimensions of new reproductive and genetic technologies with funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the European Commission, the Economic and Social Research Council the British Academy, the Philomathia Foundation, and the Medical Research Council. In 2010 she was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Biology.
The post-modernist aspects of some of her work have been criticized by someone outside her fields of research.
On 12 October 2017 she became a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Selected publications