Rayvon Fouché

Promoted to Professor
School of Inderdisciplinary Studies
rfouche@purdue.edu

Rayvon Fouché holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree in science and technology studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in humanities from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He completed a two-year, post-doctoral fellowship in African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship on invention and innovation explores the multiple intersections and relationships between cultural representation, racial identification, and technoscientific design.

Fouché, the director of the American studies program since 2014, has authored or edited five books: Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins, 2017); the fourth edition of The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (MIT, 2016); Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson (Johns Hopkins, 2005); Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota, 2004); and Technology Studies: Volume One (Key Issues for the 21st Century) (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2008).

Fouché has won grants and awards from the Illinois Informatics Institute, Illinois Program for the Research in Humanities, Center for Advanced Study, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lelemson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.