Rayvon Fouché holds a joint appointment as Professor of Communication Studies and Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrative Marketing Communications. He authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
He was the inaugural Arthur Mollela Distinguished Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Illinois Informatics Institute, Illinois Program for the Research in Humanities, University of Illinois' Center for Advanced Study, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation have supported his research and teaching.
He previously held faculty appointments in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the History Department and the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the American Studies program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Most recently he served as Division Director of Social and Economic Sciences within the Directorate of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the National Science Foundation.
Education
B.A., Humanities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
M.A., Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
Ph.D., Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University