About

SOFI THANHAUSER  writes about global history and politics. Her work has been featured in MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, and Vox.  She was the recipient of the 2025 Whiting Award, the 2024 Calderwood Journalism Fellowship and has received fellowships and residencies from the Fulbright, Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, Jentel, and VCCA. She is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon 2022). Her second book, Shelter, is forthcoming from Riverhead. As a multimedia artist Thanhauser works with language, image, song, textile, video, and performance, often exploring how words operate in their different capacities as images, sounds, and conceptual markers. 

How thrilling to encounter this uniquely elegant intelligence. Sofi Thanhauser’s curiosity is a gift to the reader; her sentences are as layered as her investigations, which look with a devoted intensity at the objects around us that might otherwise escape our attention. This includes the very fabric of the clothes we wear: how it is grown and sewn, by whom and at what cost, and how those threads twine our history with the planet’s future. Argument, memoir, and reportage grow in scope and import, becoming symphonic.

– Whiting Award Citation

Sofi Thanhauser by Beowulf Sheehan