Associate Professor Nadine Ehlers
Deputy Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies
Nadine Ehlers is a social theorist, interdisciplinary collaborative scholar, and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates race, the biosciences and biomedicine, governance, and their intersections. This work is centrally concerned with the asymmetrical administration of life/death at the level of the ‘biological.’ Currently, she is working on a project focused on the bio/necro/vital politics of race and genetic research. She is co-author of The Racial Cage (2025) and Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making (2019), author of Racial Imperatives (2012), and editor of Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine (2017). At the University of Sydney she is Deputy Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societiesand lead of the ‘Race, Ethnicity, and the Biohumanities’ research theme, and she is on the editorial boards of Australian Feminist Studiesand Distinktion: A Journal of Social Theory. She has previously held positions at Georgetown University, the University of North Carolina, and The Ohio State University, and was invited Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
- Critical Race Studies: racialization, black feminist theory, philosophy of race
- Science and Technology Studies
- Feminist and Queer Theory
- Biopolitics
- Biomedicine, biosciences, health
Recent Ph.D. supervision
Gilbert Knaggs, Getting Older, Living Rural: A Qualitative Study with Older Adults of Rural NSW (ongoing, due for Dec 2025 submission)
Freya Kerwick, Constructing Failure: The Incel Subject within Contemporary Sexual Identification,University of Sydney (conferred Jan 2025)
Current teaching
Sociology of Exclusion
Sociology of the Body
Advanced Sociological Theory (Honours)
Ehlers is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Racial Futurity: The Specter of Life
- American Studies Association
- American Sociological Association
- 4S Society for Social Studies of Science
Recent Awards:
2025 Menzies Australia Institute,King’s Australia Partnership Seed Fund. Research Team: Anne Pollock (King’s College London), Nadine Ehlers (University of Sydney), Dr Tanisha Spratt, Dr Annabel Sowemimo, and Chanelle Scott (King’s College London) for ‘The State of Racialized Health’($16,000)
2024 Charles Perkins Centre/Jennie Mackenzie Research Fund forEmbodying Inequalities: Metabolic Justice in the Anthropocene (Alex Broom, Katherine Kenny, Jaky Troy, Manos Stamatakis, David Raubenheimer, Steve Simpson, Nadine Ehlers, Imogen Harper)($294,000)
2024 Menzies Australia InstituteKing’s Australia Partnership Seed Fund. Research Team: Anne Pollock (King’s College London, lead), Nadine Ehlers (University of Sydney), Jaya Keaney (University of Melbourne), Emma Kowal (Deakin University), Tanisha Spratt (King’s College London) for ‘Race and Biohumanities Workshop’ (March) ($16,000).
2023 Australian Research Council Discovery Grant [DP230100372]. The Social Life of Death. Investigators: Alex Broom, Katherine Kenny,and Nadine Ehlers ($615,000)
2019 Wellcome Trust, UK, Small Grant in Humanities and Social Sciences, ‘Biomedicine Beyond the Lab’ (co-writer of grant, steering committee member with C1 Anne Pollock, King’s College London) ($60,000)
2018 FASS Strategic Research Theme, “Biohumanities,” Inaugural round, Sonja van Wichelen,Nadine Ehlers, Warwick Anderson, Paul Griffiths, and Laura Ferracioli ($80,000)
Selected publications
(University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
(University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
(Indiana University Press, 2012)
Publications
Selected Grants
2023
- The Social Life of Death, Broom A, Kenny K, Ehlers N, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Discovery Projects (DP)
2016
- Racial Futurity: Biopolitics, Reproduction, and the Specter of Life, Ehlers N, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences/Research Support Scheme (FRSS)
In the media
Key recent media/public engagements:
Black Agenda Report Book Forum: Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar’s “Deadly Biocultures” (24 June 2020): https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-nadine-ehlers-and-shiloh-krupars-deadly-biocultures
Black Agenda Report Book Forum: Nadine Ehlers and Leslie Hinkson’s “Subprime Health” (11 September 2019): https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-nadine-ehlers-and-leslie-hinksons-subprime-health
KPFA Radio (20 January 2020), ‘Against the Grain’: The Pitfalls of Race-based Medicine: https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-january-20-2020/