Abbreviated CV

Josh Berson is a novelist, anthropologist, and sometime tinkerer with sound. His work explores the history of human niche construction with a view to elucidating the ecology of sentience, our kinship with other presences living and geospheric, and the practical demands of food and shelter.

Books

• 2023 Autologous (The Elephants on the Salish Sea)
• 2021 The Human Scaffold (University of California)
• 2019 The Meat Question (MIT)
• 2015 Computable Bodies (Bloomsbury)

Selected Essays, Papers, etc

• 2022 Review of Johanna Drucker, Inventing the Alphabet (アイデア・IDEA 398)
• 2022 Deferred Maintenance (032c)
• 2021 Urbanization and the Limits of Scale (Aeon)
• 2019 Excerpt from The Meat Question (Salon)
• 2016 (with Melissa Ellamil et al) One in the Dance (PLoS ONE)
• 2014 The Dialectal Tribe and the Doctrine of Continuity (Comparative Studies in Society and History)

Selected Media

• 2022 Looking Back to Look Forwards (Counterpoint, ABC Radio)
• 2022 Stuff(The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio)
• 2021 Moving Forward Together (At a Distance)
• 2021 I’m Recruiting Troops for the War on Waste (Gillian Tett in the Financial Times)
• 2019 Did Meat Make Us Human? (Slate)

Selected Events

• 2022 Land Deals in the Metaverse (with Exponential View)
• 2021 The Politics of Breathing (with Elizabeth Chin and the Berggruen Institute)
• 2021 Problems with Stuff (with Vaughn Tan and the Berggruen Institute)

Selected Residencies and Appointments

• 2022 Bogong Centre for Sound Culture (Victoria)
• Since 2021 Senior Advisor, Institute for the Future
• 2018–19 USC Berggruen Fellow in the Transformations of the Human
• 2017 Shiro Oni Studio
• 2013–17 Visiting Researcher, Neuroanatomy and Connectivity, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences