History of Technology
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Upcoming Meetings
There are no currently scheduled upcoming events.
Past Meetings
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October 15, 2019
Tech Working Group will not meet on October 15, due to the upcoming international SHOT conference
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September 17, 2019
What is the history of technology and who gets to decide?
The group will discuss Eric Schatzberg's conclusion and manifesto from his Technology: Critical History of a Concept, and Jennifer Lieberman's essay "Finding a Place for Technology."
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April 16, 2019
Benjamin Twagira, Emory University, paper title "'We Are What What We Know': Radio, Rumor, Identity and Politics in Militarized Kampala"
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March 19, 2019
Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Louis Obispo, "Knowledge Space Eco-Technics: Designing Life-Forms and Life Ways at Biosphere 2, 1974-1994"
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February 19, 2019
Whitney Laemmli, Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, "The Lilt in Labour: Movement, Efficiency, and Pleasure in Mid-Century British Industry"
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January 15, 2019
James Esposito, Ohio State University, "The Airplane as Breathing Machine: Aviation Medicine and Human Experimentation at the Royal Air Force Physiological Laboratory 1939-1954"
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November 20, 2018
We will be reading Lee Vinsel and Andy Russell's Technology and Culture article "After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance." Jennifer Alexander will share some thoughts to share some thoughts to start the conversation.
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October 16, 2018
Peter Sachs Collopy, Caltech Archives, "When Computer Animation was Analog: Scanimation Outside the Digital Paradigm"
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September 25, 2018
NOTE SPECIAL DATE
Yuan Yi, Columbia University, "Custom-Made Machines in the Era of Mass Production" (dissertation chapter)
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May 15, 2018
Alicia Maggard, Brown University, presenting "Pacific Mail, Industrial Empire:
Steam Infrastructure and U.S. Power", a chapter from her dissertation.
Group Conveners
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Jennifer Alexander
Jennifer Alexander is an Associate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, with specialization in technology and religion; industrial culture; and engineering, ethics, and society. Her publications include The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Her current project is a book manuscript analyzing the international religious critique of technology that developed following WWII. She asks how religious and theological interpretations of technology have changed over time; how, over time, technologies and engineering have extended their reach into the human world over time through a developing technological orthodoxy; and how these changes have affected each other.
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Benjamin Gross
Benjamin Gross is Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri. He is responsible for managing the Library’s scholarly outreach initiatives, including its fellowship program. Before relocating to the Midwest in 2016, he was a research fellow at the Science History Institute and consulting curator of the Sarnoff Collection at the College of New Jersey. His book, The TVs of Tomorrow: How RCA’s Flat-Screen Dreams Led to the First LCDs, was published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press.
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