Nikolas Rose

Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Social Science Health and Medicine at King’s College, London. Previously he was the Martin White Professor of Sociology, and Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining LSE in 2002, he was Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, where he had been Head of the Department of Sociology, Dean of Social and Mathematical Sciences, Pro-Warden for Research and Head of the Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) and Director of a major evaluation of urban regeneration in South East London

Nikolas Rose was trained as a biologist before switching to psychology and then to sociology. He was a founding editor of two influential radical journals in the 1970s and 1980s – Ideology and Consciousness (I&C), which played a key role in introducing French post-structuralist critical thought to an English speaking audience, and Politics and Power which sought to develop a new approach to political analysis and strategy. He founded the History of the Present Research Network, an international network of researchers influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault; together with Paul Rabinow, he edited the Fourth Volume of Foucault's Essential Works. From 1996 to 2004 he was managing editor of Economy and Society, one of Britain's leading scholarly interdisciplinary journals of social sciences and he remains an active member of the Editorial Board. He is co-editor of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for social studies of the life sciences.Biosocieties

Nikolas Rose has published widely on the social and political history of the human sciences, on the genealogy of subjectivity, on the history of empirical thought in sociology, on law and criminology, and on changing rationalities and techniques of political power. His books include The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869-1939(Routledge, 1984), Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (Routledge, 1989, Second Edition, Free Association Press, 1999), Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century(Princeton University Press, 2006). His most recent book, written with Peter Miller, is Governing The Present (Polity Press, 2008). His forthcoming book, Neuro, written with Joelle Abi-Rached, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2012. His work has been translated into Chinese, Danish, German, French, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

One longstanding concern of his research explores the role of the life sciences and the psy sciences in changing conceptions of human identity, and shifting ways of thinking about and governing human beings. His recent three year ESRC funded Professorial Research Fellowship examined the political, social, legal and economic implications of recent developments in neuroscience and neurotechnologies from this perspective, examining the conceptual and practical consequences of changes in ideas about normality and abnormality, in the distinction between cure and enhancement, and in the borderlines between illness and health.

Nikolas Rose was lead partner in BIONET, a 21 partner consortium, funded by the European Commission, examining the ethical governance of research in the life sciences in China and Europe. He is also co-director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation (CSynBI), a major joint research centre between King’s College and Imperial College, London to develop world-leading research and build UK capacity in the emerging field of synthetic biology in a manner that is fully engaged with the social, political and ethical implications of such work. He is a member of the Steering Committee of Society and Ethics Pillar of the Human Brain Project, a pilot project shortlisted for the European FET Flagship Program.

He is a member of numerous advisory groups including the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and has worked with the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Science and the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Strategy Committee and is Chair of the European Neuroscience and Society Network funded by the European Science.