A/Prof. Eben Kirksey

Eben Kirksey attended the University of Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Duke University Press has published his first two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014).

See Google Scholar for his latest academic publications. 

When controversy broke about the world’s first genetically modified babies, Prof. Kirksey spoke about ethics from the main stage of the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. Over 1.8 million people watched news unfold from the Summit in real time, as Dr. Jiankui He revealed the details of his CRISPR experiment. After the dust settled, Eben Kirksey traveled to mainland China where he secured insider access to Dr. He’s laboratory. The Mutant Project chronicles the profit-driven medical enterprises continue to push CRISPR into reproductive clinics.

In academic circles, Prof. Kirksey is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” an article co-authored with Stefan Helmreich, has served as a charter for anthropologists and intellectual allies who study other species whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds. Recently, Kirksey has introduced new approaches to chemo-ethnography in collaboration with Nicholas Shapiro. 

Within the art world Kirksey has become an established curator. A 2012 cover story of Art Review celebrated his first New York City exhibit: The Multispecies Salon which brought together environmental artists with hackers who are remaking life itself. At Roskilde, the annual European music festival featuring 180 bands and over 130,000 festival-goers, Kirksey collaborated with performance artists to animate insights from his last book, Emergent Ecologies, with a site-specific installation. Princeton University hosted an art exhibit to launch the book, and a Brooklyn warehouse hosted a continuation of the show with over 90 artists his ideas.

Kirksey has delivered scores of invited lectures and keynote presentations at distinguished international institutions including Oxford University, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris), Oxford University, Yale University, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Stanford University.

After witnessing human rights abuses, and writing about them in Freedom in Engangled Worlds, Eben Kirksey became dedicated to social justice. In September 2010 he testified in a Congressional Hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives about massacres in West Papua.

Eben Kirksey is an expert on science and justice.

Journalists from the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Democracy Now, and the BBC, among many other media outlets, have sought him out as an expert.

"The Promise of Justice," ARC Discovery Project with Sophie Chao (Sydney), Anna Tsing (UC Santa Cruz), and Benny Giay (KINGMI), 2020-2023.