In terms of research, writing, and teaching, Donna Haraway is one of the most important practitioners in a field that ties together science and technology studies, anthropology, and animal studies. Having done an undergraduate degree at Colorado College with a major in Zoology and minors in Philosophy and English, she went on to complete her Ph.D. at Yale in Biology (but with an "interdisciplinary arrangement" with the Departments of Biology, Philosophy, and History of Science and Medicine). She began her teaching career at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, moved to Johns Hopkins, and joined the History of Consciousness Board at UC Santa Cruz in 1980. Once again defying traditionally defined departmental categorization, however, Professor Haraway holds associate memberships in Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, and Film and Digital Media. Throughout her work, Haraway explores the ties between technical and popular worlds and the thick traffic between natures and cultures. She is committed to supporting practical collaborations and intellectual exchange between working scientists, especially biologists, and scholars in the arts, social sciences, and humanities.


Haraway is a leading theorist of the relationships between people, other organisms, and machines, her work having incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. A cyborg, she explained in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), is a "hybrid of machine and organism." It is a "fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices." "The Cyborg Manifesto," first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate and graduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe. In addition to a long list of essays, Professor Haraway is also the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos (North Atlantic Books, 2004, originally Yale University Press, 1976); Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science ( Routledge, 1989); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse (Routledge, 1997); and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).