Max Fennell-Chametzky

I am a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEAM) field working on the history of the behavioral, evolutionary, environmental, and human sciences in the United States, France, and Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. I have a particular interest in understanding how these sciences have shaped conceptions of “the human”—especially language, learning, and reasoning—in the modern world. My dissertation project, tentatively titled “The Ape Language Experiments: Science, Human Nature, and the Living World in the Global Twentieth Century,” is a cultural and intellectual history of attempts to instruct (mostly) chimpanzees and gorillas in American Sign Language and other symbolic communication systems, which raised existential questions around the nature of humanness, the environment, and science itself.

My work has received generous support from the Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences, the Stanford Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, the Stanford Europe Center, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24, I was a Digital Public Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where I edited colloquies for the SHC’s online publication Arcade. In 2025-26, I enjoyed an interdisciplinary year as a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Center for Affective Science, and in 2026-27 I am pleased to return to the SHC as a Dissertation Prize Fellow.

I have presented my research at University of Chicago and Stanford seminars, the Annual Conference of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at the University of Notre Dame, the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology, the Society for Social Studies of Science, and the History of Science Society.

Raised in Iowa City, Iowa, I am a Hawkeye via critical period imprinting and a Tottenham Hotspur supporter by poorly informed choice. When not writing and researching, I am usually on the basketball court or at the movie theater—occasionally even on the same day.