Sherry Turkle

Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT

Sherry Turkle, a social scientist and licensed clinical psychologist, and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has spent decades studying people’s relationships with technology. Turkle is the best selling author of seven books and three edited collections, including four landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together, and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. In her most recent book, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir, hailed in the New York Times as “a beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre,” she turns her method of “intimate ethnography,” on her own life, examining the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped her into the woman and researcher she became, making the point that her emotional and intellectual path became one, that her career, as she put it, became “lit from within.” Her pioneering object studies, Evocative Objects, The Inner History of Devices, Falling For Science, and Simulation and Its Discontents, are touchstones in her program to understand the deep psychology of our lives with objects. 

Turkle has a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, she is a featured media commentator, a recipient of a Harvard Centennial Medal, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

WEBSITES:
https://sherryturkle.mit.edu

sherryturkle.com

HIGHLIGHTS:

First Place, National Jewish Book Award, A New York Times Critics’ Best Books of 2021. NYT Review of The Empathy Diaries