Dr. Alison Renna is a scholar of science, technology, and religion. She is currently working as the President and CEO of the Saxifrage Institute, a liberal arts institution based in New York City which offers humanities courses to any interested adult on a sliding scale. Dr. Renna has taught at Yale College and Skidmore College.
Dr. Renna earned her Doctorate and Masters of Philosophy in Religious Studies at Yale, a Masters of Arts in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale, and a Bachelor of Arts in Science, Technology, and Society and Religious Studies from Franklin and Marshall College, summa cum laude. Her work at Yale was funded by a Stephen and Clara A. Condict Fellowship and by the National Science Foundation. Her work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and American Religion, among other outlets.
Dr. Renna teaches courses on fundamental problems in thought that arise in science, religion, and the project of interpretation. At Yale College and Skidmore College, she taught courses on phenomenology in existentialist philosophy and science studies, science and religion, religion and ecology, the fate of metaphysics, and religion in the United States. She has given talks on philosophy, religion, and science for environmental organizations, university science departments, and in diplomatic fora at the United Nations.
In her dissertation “Modes and Conditions of Existence: Consent and Risk in Ecology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, from The Manhattan Project to The Human Microbiome Project” she wrote about the ways scientific and political communities drew from religious ideas to develop concepts of ecological risk that have shaped both basic science and US politics, beginning with the Manhattan Project in the 1940s and ending with research into the human microbiome-brain connection in the 2010s. Dr. Renna’s dissertation was co-directed by Noreen Khawaja and Joanna Radin. In collaboration with attorneys, she also researched the legal potential for environmental protections contained in the U.S. Constitution’s articulation of its stakeholders.
Dr. Renna has served on the steering committee of the American Academy of Religion’s Science, Technology, and Society unit and on the Board of Directors of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. She was a 2024 Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies Fellow. She founded the Undergraduate Science and Technology Studies reading group at Yale. In the past, she served as a guest editor and curator and editorial assistant at The Immanent Frame. She also served as the head graduate affiliate of Pierson College.
Dr. Renna considers her most important work at Yale to have been two projects: as chair of Facilities and Healthcare for the Yale Graduate Student Assembly, she was part of a team that successfully advocated for humanities and science stipends for graduate trainees to be made equal at Yale, and in her final year at Yale she successfully advocated for increased workplace safety measures in all laboratory, study, and classroom spaces across the university.