Technology Then and Now

Paula Findlen is the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Co-Director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University. Professor Findlen's research focuses on the early history of science and medicine, particularly in Renaissance Italy. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy and editor of Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, among many other works. 

Lia Markey is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Dr. Markey's research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, collecting history, and early modern prints and drawings. She is the author of Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence and co-editor of The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750. 

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University. He studies the economic history of Europe, specializing in the early modern and modern periods. His recent research has been concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare. He has published widely, including A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton University Press, 2016) which won the Alan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association. He serves as editor in chief or the Princeton University Press books series on Economic History.