PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, DISCO NETWORK

DIVISION DIRECTOR, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SCIENCES, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES, SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, PURDUE UNIVERSITY

Ray (he/him/his) is Professor of American Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University. His work explores the multiple intersections between cultural representation, racial identification, and technological design. He has authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (Minnesota, 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). Most recently, 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 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 holds a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University. Prior to Purdue, he served on the faculty of 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, and as a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Personal Website

Purdue Email: rfouche@purdue.edu

National Science Foundation Email: rfouche@nsf.gov

HAT LAB FELLOW

Aaron Dial earned his PhD from North Carolina State University in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program where his expertise is in materialist and digital media studies, digital humanities, Black studies, and cultural studies of technology and race. These areas of expertise inform his research and teaching interests, which, broadly sketched, are affective labor, popular culture, urban spaces and temporal flows, and the nexus between sports and science and technology.

Right now, Aaron is working on his first monograph, entitled “Deadstock, A Philosophy of Sneakers and Materiality in the Afterlife of Black Bodies.” This work articulates the intimate and undiscussed connections between sneakers as material objects and Black bodies. This project excavates sneakers from the strict confines of culture and fashion, asserting their existence as an object wherein bodies act and that acts upon bodies and spaces. Furthermore, this project hones the theoretical position that sneakers exist first and foremost as literal extensions of Black bodies, both sporting and cultural. That is, in sneakers, racialized imaginations of productive bodies are enlivened both as representative cultural fantasies and a collective reverie constellating the athletic possibilities of human potential. For example, in one of Deadstock’s later chapters, “Hangtime Melancholia,” which has been published in Cultural Studies, Aaron explodes the notion of hangtime, the physics-defying fantasy of a dunker’s trajectory, to its limit for the purpose of considering the undiscussed connections in the American photographic pastimes of lynching and dunk photography.

Aaron is a big-time sneakerhead with over 30 pairs in his collection. But also, his interests are varied—you can catch him doing anything from bumping the latest music release (he’s learning to DJ!) to watching some dope anime to obsessing over NBA basketball. If you have any questions, just ask – preferably over a nice bourbon.