The History of Technology Working Group meets monthly to discuss a colleague’s works-in-progress or to discuss readings that are of particular interest to participants.
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SHOT Debrief! Tuesday, October 28, 1-2:30 EST
Join us for a debrief of the recent SHOT meeting, just held in Luxembourg (Oct. 8-12). Learn what went on if you were not there, and fill us in on what you found interesting if you were (or if you joined virtually). What are people talking about these days in HOT?
There are no documents to read before this meeting.
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William Vogel, University of Minnesota. "Negotiating Cultures of Concealment: Scientists, the Military, and Biological Weapons"
Eric Hintz, Lemelson Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. "Moneyball: the Computational Turn in Professional Sports"
Barbara Hahn, Texas Tech University. Introduction to Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Emily Gibson, Office of Legislative and Public Affairs, National Science Foundation, "Technology and Policy: Applied research and engineering at the National Science Foundation during the 1970s"
*Note special time*
Junaidu Danladi, Bayero University, Kan0-Nigeria, "Public Perceptions and Resistance to Piped Water in Kano City, 1924-1945"
Paulina Hartono, Berkeley, "Do Radios Have Politics? The Politics of Radio Ownership in China in the 1920s and 1930s"
Jaipreet Virdi, University of Delaware, "Dorothy Brett's 'Ear Machines': Disability, Technology and Representation"
Tech Working Group will not meet on October 15, due to the upcoming international SHOT conference
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."
Benjamin Twagira, Emory University, paper title "'We Are What What We Know': Radio, Rumor, Identity and Politics in Militarized Kampala"
Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Louis Obispo, "Knowledge Space Eco-Technics: Designing Life-Forms and Life Ways at Biosphere 2, 1974-1994"
Whitney Laemmli, Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, "The Lilt in Labour: Movement, Efficiency, and Pleasure in Mid-Century British Industry"
James Esposito, Ohio State University, "The Airplane as Breathing Machine: Aviation Medicine and Human Experimentation at the Royal Air Force Physiological Laboratory 1939-1954"
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.
Peter Sachs Collopy, Caltech Archives, "When Computer Animation was Analog: Scanimation Outside the Digital Paradigm"
NOTE SPECIAL DATE
Yuan Yi, Columbia University, "Custom-Made Machines in the Era of Mass Production" (dissertation chapter)
Alicia Maggard, Brown University, presenting "Pacific Mail, Industrial Empire:
Steam Infrastructure and U.S. Power", a chapter from her dissertation.
Edward Jones-Imhotep, York University, presenting "The Image of Work: Charting Human and Machine Failures at the Dawn of the Jazz Age," a chapter from his book project Reliable Humans, Trustworthy Machines.
Philip Scranton, Rutgers University, discussed his current project, A Business History of Communism: Enterprise and Experiment in China, 1950-71.
Christopher Otter, Ohio State, presented an excerpt from his book-in-progress "Diet for a Large Planet: Food Systems, World-Ecology and the Making of Industrialized Britain."
Jennifer Alexander is an Associate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She specializes 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.
Benjamin Gross is the John Merritt Associate Director for Research Services at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As a member of the senior leadership team, he oversees all aspects of research services, including reading room operations, reference and instruction, and the Center's research fellowship program. Before relocating to Texas, Gross was Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, where he established a new virtual fellowship program to support scholars unable to travel to the Midwest. He has also served as 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.
Matthew Hersch is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law, where he studies technological change, risk, and the ethics and professional responsibilities of engineers. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, and Harvard University, where he was Associate Professor of the History of Science. He is the author of Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-author of A Social History of American Technology, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2018), and co-editor of War and Peace in Outer Space: Ethical and Legal Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2021).
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