Anthony Ryan Hatch, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for the Humanities and Professor of Science and Technology Studies and African American Studies at Wesleyan University. He is an affiliated faculty member in the Bailey College of the Environment and the Department of Sociology. His research interests lie at the intersection of science and technology, health and medical humanities, and social inequality and power. He is the author of Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minnesota, 2019) and Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (Minnesota, 2016). His newest co-authored book, The Racial Cage (Minnesota, 2025)–coauthored with Nadine Elhers, Amade M’ Charek, and Anne Pollock–investigates the potential of biohumanities as a foundation for antiracist critique of the human.
Dr. Hatch received the 2022 Robin W. Williams Distinguished Lectureship Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and served as the 2023 William Allan Neilson Chair of Research at Smith College. Dr. Hatch lectures widely on health systems, medical technology, and social inequalities, appearing in the PBS documentary Blood Sugar Rising. He received the 2022 Robin W. Williams Distinguished Lectureship Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and served as the 2023 William Allan Neilson Professor at Smith College. He is a co-lead in the Sydney Center for Healthy Societies, a member of the Health and Social Equity Collective at King’s College London and the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network at Rutgers University, and is a fellow in The Hastings Center.
He earned his A.B. in Philosophy from Dartmouth College and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr. Hatch held a pre-doctoral fellowship through the Minority Fellowship Program (MFP, cohort 31) sponsored by the American Sociological Association and the National Institute of Mental Health (2004-2007) and a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellowship in HIV/AIDS, substance use, and mental health research in at the Morehouse School of Medicine (2009-2011). His research and training have been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, Wellcome Trust, and Wesleyan University.
He is a member of the Hastings Center and has served on scientific advisory boards including the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Medicine, the Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program Committee, the Community Development Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and the Opioid Industry Documents Archive. He has served on the editorial boards of Science, Technology, and Human Values and the Social History of Drugs and Alcohol.
At Wesleyan, Dr. Hatch is the founding director of Black Box Labs, an undergraduate laboratory that trains students in qualitative research methods aligned with science and technology studies. Dr. Hatch has served as the faculty coordinator for the Sustainability & Environmental Justice Pedagogical Initiative and Course Cluster and has supported the College of Design and Engineering Studies, Center for Prison Education, Creative Campus Initative, and the Embodying Antiracism Initative. He is the faculty advisor for the student-run Espwesso Cafe and serves on the executive board of the Administrators and Faculty of Color Alliance.
Recent publications:
Anthony Ryan Hatch. “The Data Will Not Save Us: Afropesimism and Racial Antimatter in the COVID-19 Pandemic,”
Big Data & Society. Published Online First February 23, 2022.
Anthony Ryan Hatch. “Du Boisian Propaganda, Foucauldian Genealogy, and Antiracism in STS Research,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 58-65.
Anthony Ryan Hatch, Sonya Sternlieb, and Julia Gordon. “Sugar Ecologies and their Metabolic and Racial Effects,” Food, Culture, and Society Special Issue, 2019.
Anthony Ryan Hatch, Julia Gordon, and Sonya Sternlieb. “The Artificial Pancreas in Cyborg Bodies,” pp. in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Body and Embodiment, eds. Natalie Boreo and Katherine Mason. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Anthony Ryan Hatch and Deja Knight. “Food Sovereignty and Wellness in Urban African American Communities,” pp. 271-287 in Well-Being as a Multi-Dimensional Concept: Understanding Connections between Culture, Community, and Health, ed. Janet Page-Reeves. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019).
Anthony Ryan Hatch. “Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance,” pp. 67-84 in Captivating Technology: Race, Technoscience, and the Carceral Imagination, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
Anthony Ryan Hatch. “Against Diabetic Numerology in a Black Body, or Why I Cannot Live by the Numbers,” pp. 231-234 in Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations. Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan eds. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019).