Hélène Mialet’s training and research interests are in continental philosophy, science and technology studies, and social theory. Her Ph.D. is from the Sorbonne and the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris. She has held post-docs at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and positions at Cornell, Berkeley, and Harvard. Her first book, L’Entreprise Créatrice (Hermès, 2008) is a philosophical and ethnographic study of the practices and processes of invention in an applied research laboratory in a multinational oil company (Total). Her second book is entitled Hawking Incorporated (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). This work provides an ethnographic study of abstraction and formalism, focusing on the case of Stephen Hawking as a means of exploring larger questions having to do with singularity, identity, distributed agency, subjectivity, corporeality and socio-technical networks.

Presently, she is working on a book length manuscript entitled Rethinking the Actor of Invention, which is a theoretical reflection on the history and sociology of ideas about the knowing subject, and formulating a new project on type-1 diabetes and its management which engages with notions of the self, personhood, and control. She has worked extensively on topics ranging from Actor Network Theory; scientific and technological practice; situated and distributed cognition; the role of the subject’s body in knowledge production; charisma and organizational management; creativity and innovation; human-machine interaction; New Media and Disability Studies.