Xaq Frohlich

Xaq Frohlich is an Associate Professor of History of Technology in the Department of History at Auburn University. His research centers on risk communication, food as a liminal object that bridges the environment and human health, and socially responsible consumption. His book, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age, is a history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's food labeling policies and a study in the relationship between public institutions, private market actors, and the consumer politics surrounding food, diet, and health.

Frohlich received his Ph.D. from the Program in History, Anthropology, and STS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011. He was a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant for his research on the FDA and nutrition labeling. He also worked on agricultural biotechnology in an international development context, helping Oxfam America assess the socioeconomic impact of transgenic cotton on resource-poor farmers. In 2009-2010, he was a Spain Fulbright Fellow investigating the story of how the Mediterranean diet was rediscovered by health scientists and reinvented as a globally marketable, healthy lifestyle.

Frohlich has worked and taught on issues relating to food and STS in many countries and has travelled substantially across Europe, East Asia, and North America. In 2014-2016 he held a two-year postdoc in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea, where he taught and did research on the regulatory boundaries between foods versus drugs in Eastern medicine markets. Before coming to Auburn, he was a postdoc at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin as part of their 2016-2017 focus on “The Reinvention of Food.” He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Vienna, Paris Dauphine University, and the University of Hong Kong.