Gabrielle Hecht

Professor of History

Professor of Anthropology, by courtesy

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science (1992)

M.A., University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science (1988)

S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Physics (1986)

Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and Professor (by courtesy) of Anthropology.

Hecht’s most recent book, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke 2023), dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. The book outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what Hecht theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. It received two 2024 PROSE awards, for Government and Politics and for Excellence in Social Science. It’s available in Open Access.

Hecht’s previous monograph, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012) explores Africa’s place in the nuclear world, focusing on uranium mines and miners in Gabon, Madagascar, Niger, Namibia, and South Africa. Among other awards, it received the Martin Klein Prize in African history and was shortlisted for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits prize. An abridged version appeared in French as Uranium Africain, une histoire globale (Le Seuil, 2016). Her other books include The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (MIT Press 1998, 2nd edition 2009) and the edited collection Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (MIT Press, 2011). Gabrielle Hecht taught in Stanford’s History department at the beginning of her academic career. Before returning in 2017, she was a member of University of Michigan’s History department for eighteen years. She served as associate director of UM's African Studies Center and was an active participant in its collaborative project with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER, South Africa) on Joining Theory and Empiricism in the remaking of the African Humanities. She is co-editor of Toxicity, Waste and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond, a series of short essays from this collaboration. Hecht is currently a Research Associate at WiSER.

Hecht’s new project is a collaborative project co-directed with South African artist Potšišo Phasha. Entitled Inside-Out Earth, it explores the historical origins and contemporary complexities of energy wastes, as well as the many ways in which people cope with or mitigate their noxious effects. Hecht and Phasha are engaging in multi-sited, multi-scalar research in collaboration with teams in four sites: Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire; Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic; Mpumalanga, South Africa; and Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1986). She’s been a visiting scholar in universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. Hecht’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others. She has been interviewed for several documentary films, as well as by print and broadcast media in North America, Europe, and Africa.