Rayvon Fouche
THE LATIMER LEGACY – Humanities Team
Rayvon Fouché is the director of National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division. He is serving in this position through NSF’s rotator program, which recruits U.S. scientists, engineers, and educators for limited-term leadership positions of up to four years.
Dr. Fouché is Professor of American Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University. His work explores the multiple intersections between cultural representation, racial identification, and technological design. He has authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of The Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
Dr. Fouché was the inaugural Arthur Mollela Distinguished Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. He has received grants and awards in support of his research and teaching from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Illinois Informatics Institute, Illinois Program for the Research in Humanities, University of Illinois’ Center for Advanced Study, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
Dr. Fouché holds a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University. Prior to Purdue, he served on the faculty of the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the History Department and the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and as a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
