In Memoriam: Andrew Lakoff, influential anthropologist of risk, science and society

Andrew Lakoff, an influential anthropologist whose research explored how science and technology shape the way people understand themselves and societies prepare for an uncertain future, died July 7 from glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He was 56.

Lakoff was a professor of sociology and anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. His wide-ranging scholarship encompassed psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, public health, pandemics and emergency preparedness. He authored books on psychiatry and emergency preparedness, founded USC Dornsife’s Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life and served as divisional dean for the social sciences from 2017 to 2020.

“Andy’s career was defined not by being in a discipline but in connecting different disciplinary spaces from which he could draw theories, methods, empirical orientations and colleagues,” said Stephen Collier, chair and professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley and Lakoff’s close friend and collaborator for 30 years.

A campus event celebrating the life and work of Lakoff will be held Oct. 5 at 2:30 p.m. All are welcome, and those unable to attend in person can watch remotely.

Examining science and society

Lakoff earned a bachelor’s degree in history, summa cum laude, and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UC Berkeley. After a postdoctoral fellowship in medical anthropology at Harvard University, he joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 2002. Seven years later, he came to USC as an associate professor of sociology and communication.

Lakoff came from a family of educators and scholars, including his mother, the late Robin Tolmach Lakoff, and father, George Lakoff, both renowned linguists at UC Berkeley.

“Andy shared with his parents a drive to transform the fields in which he worked, a firm belief in the unique role of the research university in society, and a sense that scholarship should engage with and transform political and social life,” said Daniela Bleichmar, his wife and professor of art history and history at USC Dornsife.

His early scholarship explored the globalization of biomedical psychiatry and the different ways mental illness was understood and treated across cultures. His first book, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, published in 2006, drew on ethnographic research in Buenos Aires to examine tensions between psychoanalytic and biological approaches to mental illness.

Lakoff’s interest in how societies respond to uncertainty also shaped his research on biosecurity and emergency planning, including how governments and other institutions anticipate and prepare for uncertain threats. That work produced Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency in 2017 and The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security, co-authored with Collier, in 2021.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lakoff examined how decades of pandemic planning shaped the United States’ response, culminating in his 2024 book, Planning for the Wrong Pandemic. Rather than simply asking why the response faltered despite years of preparation, he explored how the concepts and techniques developed to prepare for future pandemics helped shape a response poorly suited to the crisis that actually unfolded.

Ideas above hierarchy

Collaboration was central to Lakoff’s approach to scholarship.

“Andy saw dialogue and collaboration as one of the great privileges of an intellectual’s life,” said Bleichmar. “He cared above all about good ideas, whether they came from a beginning graduate student or a senior professor. Rank and prestige meant little to him; it was the ideas that mattered.”

That commitment to collaboration took many forms. In 2011, Lakoff co-founded Limn, an innovative experimental journal, with Collier and Christopher Kelty, a professor at UCLA. The journal brought together scholars from different fields for collaborative examinations of contemporary problems.

Students, in particular, benefited from Lakoff’s generosity as a teacher and mentor. He encouraged young scholars to develop confidence in their own ideas and a distinctive scholarly voice. Melina Sherman, a former graduate student of Lakoff’s who is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, described him as an “intellectual hero” who taught her “how to think.”

“He showed me that I should never accept a problem without approaching it from all angles, reconstructing its history and tracing the mechanisms and techniques through which power quietly becomes ordinary,” Sherman said.

Bringing scholars together

When he was divisional dean for the social sciences, Lakoff worked to strengthen support for faculty research, recruit and retain faculty and increase accountability and transparency among the division’s institutes and centers.

Peter Mancall, Distinguished Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at USC Dornsife, who served as divisional dean for the humanities while Lakoff led the social sciences, described him as a “brilliantly capable administrator.”

“Andy understood rigorous, interdisciplinary research, which gave him the intellectual gravitas to nurture scholarly connections with faculty and students,” said Mancall.

Lakoff also built programs that brought scholars together across disciplines. He established USC Dornsife’s partnership with the Berggruen Institute, which brought visiting fellows to USC to pursue research and engage with faculty and students. The program ultimately supported 32 long-term fellows with $9 million in funding.

In 2020, Lakoff founded the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, which he directed until his death. It brings together faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from fields as diverse as environmental studies, architecture, computer science and cinema to explore problems at the intersection of science, technology, environment and society. Through lectures, seminars, workshops and working groups, the center encourages exchange within and outside USC.

Lakoff’s curiosity about work beyond his own field extended even to committee service. Lakoff served four years on the Dornsife Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure, including two as chair. Bleichmar said it was his favorite service role because it allowed him to read and discuss research from across the College.

Those who worked closely with Lakoff remember both the rigor he brought to scholarship and the generosity he brought to teaching and intellectual life.

“Andy had a rare combination of gifts: the vision to see where fields of study might be heading, the energy to bring people together around an emerging question and the composure to navigate administrative systems with aplomb,” said Peter Redfield, professor of anthropology and history at USC Dornsife, whom Lakoff recruited to USC Dornsife and STPL.

Collier remembered the care Lakoff brought to their three decades of collaboration.

“I appreciated his profound curiosity and meticulous attention to detail,” Collier said. “For Andy, every word mattered. And there was a relentless self-critical questioning: Did we get this right?”

Lakoff is survived by his wife, Daniela Bleichmar, and their daughters, Natalia and Paloma Lakoff.