Max Fennell-Chametzky

Max Fennell-Chametzky is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEAM) field. He works on the history of the behavioral and life sciences in the United States, France, and Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. His dissertation project, tentatively titled “Primate Verbalizations: Ape Language Experiments and the Global Remaking of the Human, 1930-2013,” is the first cultural and intellectual history of the “ape language era,” a period in behavioral science defined by experiments seeking to instruct (mostly) chimpanzees and gorillas in American Sign Language and other symbolic communication systems, which raised existential questions over the nature of humanness and the nature of science.

His work has been supported by 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, Max was a Digital Public Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where he edited colloquies for the SHC’s online publication Arcade. In 2025-26, he is a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Center for Affective Science.

Max serves as a communications officer for the Graduate and Early Career Caucus (GECC) of the History of Science Society (HSS). The GECC bimonthly newsletter can be read and subscribed to here.

When not writing and researching, he can be found on the basketball court or at the movie theater—occasionally even on the same day.