Ph.D. - University of California, San Diego, 2001
Areas of Interest: Social and Political Theory, Sociology of Knowledge and Intellectuals, Sociology of Science and Technology, Marxism, Culture, Ecology and Society
Email Address: firstname.lastname@example.org
Phone number: 858-534-0953
Office location: 497 Social Science Building
Thinkers Prof. Thorpe has written about and/or is particularly interested in: Mikhail Bakunin, J. D. Bernal, Murray Bookchin, Guy Debord, Philip K. Dick, Norbert Elias, Jacques Ellul, Shumalith Firestone, John Bellamy Foster, Erich Fromm, Anthony Giddens, R. D. Laing, Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, István Mészáros, Antonio Negri, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Michael Polanyi, Max Weber.
SOCI 1- Introduction to Sociology
SOCI 167- Science and War
SOCG 255D- Advanced Approaches to Science Studies
Thorpe, Charles Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press. 2006.
Through a sociological biography of atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, this book examines the transformation of the social and political role of American scientists during World War Two and the Cold War.
Charles Thorpe, "A New Approach for STS? A Synthesis of Marxism and Actor-Network Theory,"Science as Culture 24 (3) (2015): 351-357.
Charles Thorpe, "Repression in the Neoliberal University," in Rebecca Fisher ed., Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent: Capitalism, Democracy and the Organisation of Consent (London: Corporate Watch, 2013), 217-231.
Charles Thorpe and Brynna Jacobson, "Life politics, nature and the state: Giddens' sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change," The British Journal of Sociology 64 (1) (March 2013): 99-122.
Charles Thorpe, "Artificial Life on a Dead Planet," in Kelly Gates ed., Media Studies Futures, Volume VI of The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies (General editor Angharad N. Valdavia) (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 615-647.
“Death of a Salesman: Petit-Bourgeois Dread in Philip K. Dick’s Mainstream Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 38(3) (November 2011): 412-434.
"Participation as Post-Fordist Politics: Demos, New Labour, and Science Policy," Minerva 48 (4) (2010): 389-411
(with Jane Gregory) “Producing the Post-Fordist Public: The Political Economy of Public Engagement with Science” Science as Culture 19 (3) (September 2010): 273-301.
“Alienation as Death: Technology, Capital, and the Degradation of Everyday Life in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine” Science as Culture 18 (3) (2009): 261-279.
“Community and the Market in Michael Polanyi’s Philosophy of Science,” Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009): 59-89.
“A Splintered Function: Fate, Faith and the Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Metascience 17 (2008): 351-387. Review symposium on Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, with author response to reviews by Sheila Jasanoff, Michael Gordin, and Andrew Jewett.
“Capitalism, Audit, and the Demise of the Humanistic Academy,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 15 (September 2008).
(with Ian Welsh) “Beyond Primitivism: Towards a Twenty-First Century Anarchist Theory and Praxis for Science and Technology,” Anarchist Studies 16 (1) (2008): 48-75.
“Political Theory in Science and Technology Studies,” The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edition, eds., Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, Judy Wajcman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 63-82.
“Review of The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi,” Journal of Historical Biography 3 (Spring 2008): 134-139.
“The Sociological Imagination of R. D. Laing,” (with Susie Scott), Sociological Theory 24 (4) (2006): 331–352.
“The Scientist in Mass Society: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Post-War Liberal Imagination,” in Cathryn Carson and David Hollinger eds., Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections Berkeley Papers in History of Science (Berkeley, CA: Office for the History of Science and Technology, University of California, Berkeley). (2005)
“Violence and the Scientific Vocation,” Theory, Culture, and Society 21 (3) (2004): 59-84.
“Against Time: Scheduling, Momentum, and Moral Order at Wartime Los Alamos,” Journal of Historical Sociology 17 (1) (March 2004): 31-55.
“Disciplining Experts: Scientific Authority and Liberal Democracy in the Oppenheimer Case,” Social Studies of Science 32 (4) (August 2002): 527-564.
“Science Against Modernism: The Relevance of the Social Theory of Michael Polanyi,” British Journal of Sociology 52 (1) (March 2001): 19-35.
“Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Charisma and Complex Organization” (with Steven Shapin), Social Studies of Science 30 (4) (August 2000): 545-590.