Matthew B. Crawford is an American writer and

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a p ...

at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and contains his The Lawn, Academical Village, a World H ...

Early life and education

Crawford majored in physics as an undergraduate, then turned to

political philosophy Political philosophy studies the theoretical and conceptual foundations of politics. It examines the nature, scope, and Political legitimacy, legitimacy of political institutions, such as State (polity), states. This field investigates different ...

. He earned his PhD from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

Career

In September 2001, Crawford accepted a position as executive director of the

George C. Marshall Institute The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) was a nonprofit conservative think tank in the United States. It was established in 1984 with a focus on science and public policy issues and had an initial focus in defense policy. Starting in the late 1980 ...

, but left the institute after five months, saying that "the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank."Matthew B. Crawford
''Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work''
pp. 108–109, Penguin Press, 2009. he is a

at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the

, a contributing editor at '' The New Atlantis'', and professes to be a motorcycle mechanic.

In film

Crawford appeared in the 2014 documentary ''

Merchants of Doubt ''Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming'' is a 2010 non-fiction book by American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It identifies parallels betwe ...

''.

Selected works

''Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work''
Penguin Press, 2009. . Published in London as ''The Case for Working with Your Hands''. Viking, 2009. . * ''The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction''. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. * ''Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road'', William Morrow, 2020.

References

External links