John H. Evans earned his BA from Macalester College and his PhD from Princeton. He has been a Post-doctoral Fellow at Yale, a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and has held a visiting professorial fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Muenster. He focuses on culture, politics, religion, and science with a particular interest in sociologically examining questions that have largely been addressed by humanities scholars.
He has published two books on the nature of the field now called bioethics: Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (2002, U of Chicago Press) and The History and Future of Bioethics: A Sociological View (2012, Oxford). He has also published a book titled Contested Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion, and Public Debate (2010, U of Chicago Press), which examines how ordinary religious people in the U.S. talk about reproductive genetic technologies.
Most recently he has published What is a Human? What the Answers Mean for Human Rights (2016, Oxford), which examines what the public thinks a human is, and how this impacts our views of how we are to treat each other. In addition to these books, Evans has written over 45 articles and book chapters on topics in culture, politics, religion, and science.
He is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of California at San Diego.