American sociologist who earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she studied in the Department of Social Relations. Fox was the author of a number of academic books, mainly on medical sociology and ethics; some of them have been translated into French or Japanese.
Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, she was a member of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, taught for twelve years at Barnard College, and then spent two years as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. At the University of Pennsylvania, she was a professor in the Department of Sociology with joint, secondary appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, and in the School of Nursing; and she held an interdisciplinary chair as the Annenberg Professor of the Social Sciences. From 1972-1978 she was the Chair of the Penn Sociology Department. On 1 July 1998, she became the Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences. She was also an Emerita Senior Fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Renée Fox’s major teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics – involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe (particularly in Belgium), in Central Africa (especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo), and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges, universities, and medical schools throughout the United States, and taught in a number of universities abroad. During the 1996-1997 academic year, she was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.
Fox was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Honorary Member of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. She was the holder of a Radcliffe Graduate School Medal, and of a Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, and was a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Leo G. Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology. She received several teaching awards: an E. Harris Harbison Gifted Teaching Award of the Danforth Foundation, and a Lindback Foundation Award for Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.
She held eleven honorary degrees, and in 1995, the Belgian Government named her Chevalier of the Order of Leopold II. In October 2007, she was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
Renée Fox died on 23 September 2020 at age 92.
Link to Wikipedia biography