2007 Member News
October 16th, 2007 Posted in History, WITH Information | No Comments »(Members are in alphabetical order)
Marsha Ackermann:
I am taking a break from teaching US history at Eastern Michigan University to work on a proposed History of American Spelling and hoping that an interested publisher is still interested. If not, I will seek suggestions from you and others. I am currently an independent scholar (i.e. unemployed) after leaving Eastern Michigan University at least temporarily to work on other projects. I hope to soon be writing a history of spelling in the U.S. - this topic indeed has a technological component when it comes to schemes and machines for helping people, esp. school children, learn more easily and spell better. If any WITHies have ideas about such tech aids as “Speak and Spell” and similar devices, I would be most interested in communicating with you.
Irina Aristarkhova:
Fields of interest: gender and technology, cyberfeminism, comparative feminist theory, new media aesthetics. Current project(s): In the field of gender and technology, I am currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled “Matrixial Technologies”. It addresses the ways in which ‘matrix’ - ‘womb’ - has been incorporated into scientific, technological, aesthetic and philosophical discourses through such concepts as extogenesis, male pregnancy, cyberspace and zero. A feminist critique and alternative to such ‘matrixial’ thought would be explored through cyberfeminist responses to new bio-technologies in theory and visual arts.
In 2005 I finally saw a dear project of mine finished: a translation of Luce Irigaray’s “The Ethics of Sexual Difference” appeared in Moscow, Russia, under my editorship. It came out within a book series on contemporary thinkers, published by XZ (Moscow Art Magazine’s publishing arm), with support from the French Embassy in Moscow and French Foreign Affairs Ministry.
And in November 2007 I am scheduled to present a paper at the Second International Conference “Re-Place: Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology” (Berlin, Germany, www.mediaarthistories.org). In this paper titled “Stepanova’s Laboratory” I trace a genealogy of early Soviet experiments in art and technology. Practices and discourses (I focus on the work of Varvara Stepanova) raised issues concerning the role of the artist in society and industry, and I show how those experiments might be useful today in addressing political, economic and aesthetic challenges presented by ‘creative industries’ and ‘artist-in-laboratory’ settings.
Molly Berger:
Fields of interest: 19th century cultural history, built environment, gender, urban history. I was recently promoted to Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve. I continue to plug along on the “book.” My edited volume, The American Hotel (MIT Press, 2005) has won several awards for design and one magazine named it “one of the 15 best books of 2005.” My life is busy and, if you are interested, I can regale you on the splendid qualities (cuteness high among them) of my two grandchildren, Max and Alice.
Amy Sue Bix:
Fields of interest - history of US technology, esp. 20th C; women, gender, and technology; history of medicine. Current project(s) - book on women’s engineering education; article on 1930s technology; Co-authored book - The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950; Alan I. Marcus and Amy Sue Bix, (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books/Prometheus Press, 2007).: Article – “Faculty: The People and the Disciplines,” in A Sesquicentennial History of Iowa State University: Tradition and Transformation, Dorothy Schwieder and Gretchen Van Houten, eds. (Blackwell Publ., Oxford, 2007): 217-248. (a volume celebrating ISU’s 150th anniversary). Other than that - professional work (aside from teaching and dept responsibilities) involves SHOT, SHOT and more SHOT.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk:
Fields of interest: cultural history of business and technology; design history; fashion history. Current project(s): 1) a cultural history of commercial color, 2) a cultural history of synthetic fibers. Books: American Business History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), co-edited. Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming Oct. 2007). An edited volume that examines the transnational history of fashion as a business enterprise and cultural endeavor. American Consumer Society: From Hearth to HDTV, 1965-2005 (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, American History Series, forthcoming spring 2008). Recent Fellowships: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, awarded 2006, for “The Color Revolution: Commerce, Technology, and Aesthetics in Transnational Perspective, book manuscript in preparation for the Lemelson Series at MIT Press. This is a transnational study of color marketing.
Martina Blum:
I am still teaching at the Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology. Since 2005, I am exhibit review editor for T&C and editing the German journal TECHNIKGESCHICHTE.
Carolyn Cooper:
Completely unencumbered by grant, salary or deadline, I am currently composing a paper about Samuel Colt’s economic filibustering by proxy in Sonora, Mexico in 1859. Distractions to this endeavor that I am valiantly but only partly successfully attempting to withstand: sea level rise, by which my back yard is turning into an extension to the neighboring salt marsh, a project to combat invasive phragmites growing in said marsh, and an ongoing battle to improve the behavior of a local asphalt paving company that is contaminating a marsh somewhat farther down the street. I am learning that climatic, botanical, bureaucratic, political, and legal processes all move very slowly, as does my writing. Meanwhile, I am looking forward to meeting fellow WITHies and gathering some vegetarian recipes at the upcoming SHOT conference in a venue better than Las Vegas.
Gail Cooper:
Fields of interest: women, Japan, manufacturing (quality control), architecture (air conditioning); Current project(s): history of quality control in manufacturing in US & Japan; air conditioning and landscape architecture.
News from the last two years: Gave a paper at 4S in Vancouver, November 2006 on the impact of expert systems of quality control on a wartime labor force, examining the empowerment of women and men in wartime factories as advocates of family members serving in the armed forces. Working on an article that examines the relationship of technical authority and personal authority of women in wartime factories.
Diana Covell:
I joined WITH at the 2005 SHOT Conference in Minneapolis where I gave a presentation as a PhD Candidate. I am currently one of SHOT’s international scholars.
Ruth Cowan:
After more years than I care to contemplate, I have finally finished my book on genetic screening. Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening, due out from Harvard in May, 2008. Although the title does not suggest this, my analysis depends on an historical analysis of screening technologies and the social implications of who constructed them in what particular ways. To put the matter another way, I am trying to do bioethics using the history of technology.
Also, after precisely the number of years I originally agreed to, I will step down as Chair of History and Sociology of Science at Penn in June, 2008. It’s been a great run, but I’m exhausted. In 2008-2009, when I expect to be on leave, my husband and I hope to finish our book on women engineers, also started more years ago than I care to contemplate. And then? Your guess is probably as good as mine!
Debbie Douglas:
Fields of interest: history of technology, science, aerospace, engineering education, public history. We are currently expanding the MIT Museum (opening September 28, 2007) and I have three associated exhibition projects: Zebrafish and Cancer Research (on Nancy Hopkins’ laboratory); Risks and Rewards: 25 years of research at the Whitehead Institute; and a fun display of the ingenious machines and mechanical toys created by Claude Shannon. In addition, in the past couple of years, I’ve developed four other exhibitions, the most recent being Singular Beauty: Simple Microscopes from the Giordano Collection.
I am the project director for an innovative new effort in location-based storytelling called the MIT Museum Without Walls. Basically, the idea is to turn the campus into a museum by making it possible for you to use your cell-phone, iPod, or other hand-held device, to navigate and engage with interesting stories about MIT. Part wiki, part web, part iTour, part magic, we are using wifi and GPS systems to allow devices to “know” where they are and deliver stories to you.
Traveling adventures have varied from the annual meetings of the Oughtred Society (slide rules) in Mountain View, California and SHOT in Las Vegas, to trips to Florida (Naples, Sanibel, Ft. Meyers and the Everglades), Georgia Tech in Atlanta and the Erie Canal (I led a group of friends on a bike tour of the western part of the canal from Rochester to Lockport.).
Jane Mork Gibson:
THE FOUNDING OF WITH. This is a message from the past – actually from 1976 when WITH was founded here in Philadelphia. I worked on the newsletter in those days and although I attend WITH gatherings at SHOT conferences, I have not made many other contacts with members. I would be included in the list of “Independent Scholars” although I have been employed in various capacities since that time. Along with other historical and environmental assignments, I have been working for the past 30 years as a consultant on technological history. This has had its ups and downs, but the work has been rewarding and productive. In Philadelphia I am well known as the authority for the history of the Fairmount Water Works and as the person most familiar with the city’s industrial history. Although I do not teach, I do give lectures and serve as a consultant.
To me, one of the most outstanding things about the founding of WITH was the manner in which it was embraced by the existing male-dominated SHOT officers and members who welcomed the founding of our group. We were definitely welcomed! The acronym for WITH was decided upon to represent “Women in Technological History.” This was to include women historians who did research on technology and wrote about it. Somewhere in the past thirty years, this part of the acronym was completely abandoned and WITH has been pretty much taken over by the feminist movement to refer mostly to women engineers and their work in that field. We have wonderful examples of women doing “technological history” who are never mentioned – – such as Martha Trescott, Eda Kranakis, Carolyn Cooper, Autumn Stanley, etc.
Not in D.C. this year, but perhaps in 2008 WITH might have a panel to discuss the diversity in our membership. This could be very interesting and awaken both SHOT and WITH to the real meaning of Women in Technological History. The panel could cover the various ways in which women are involved in the history of technology.
Daryl Hafter:
Newly retired! New Book: Women at Work in Preindustrial France, Penn State Press. Women’s work has always depended on their social and legal standing, and so my book begins with an analysis of female work and the reasons it has been considered “unskilled” no matter how much experience and adroitness the female worker had. Christianity had something to do with women being categorized as “other”, not involved in market production, but contributing only to the family. But the “otherness” had surprising ramifications, especially in Old Regime France, where women were not considered adults in the law. Read about the “separations des biens” and other legal devices that enabled women’s funds and businesses to be under their own control. The book then analyzes the women in guilds in Rouen, (yes, Virginia, there were women’s guilds and even women and men in mixed sex guilds). They are compared in different sections of the book with the female workers (”unskilled”) who did all the auxiliary work in the huge, technically complex silk industry of 17th and 18th century Lyon. New material on women’s work during the French Revolution completes the book.
Outside of this engrossing project, my husband and I took a Textile Museum of Washington DC tour of Mali, in December-January. We saw indigo dyeing, stitch resist dyeing, and the fabulous “mud cloth” that traditionally occupies talented Malian women. They create special “mud” solutions with fermented earth containing iron traces, and various secret herbs. Then they “paint” fabric with traditional designs, making use of ‘negative’ drawing. Our trip also showed us weaving, spinning, dancing, praying, divining. And everywhere the exceptionally handsome tall Malian people, the women wearing colorful print dresses and matching turbans, their posture straight, their demeanor dignified and easy. And, they all spoke French. I will give a slide presentation to a local Community Center here in Ann Arbor to tell the seniors about this exceptional experience in visiting Africa.
Gabrielle Hecht:
Fields of Interest: Nuclear things, colonial and post-colonial studies, African history (southern and central); Current projects: Two book manuscripts in active preparation: Uranium from Africa and the Power of Nuclear Things (working title). And Bodies, Networks, Geographies: Colonialism, Development, and Cold War Technopolitics. (Edited volume in progress) And one for the more distant future: The Technopolitics of Apartheid in Southern Africa (with Paul N. Edwards). A few recent publications: “A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things,” Isis (March 2007) 98: 100-108. “Nuclear Ontologies,” Constellations 13:3 (September 2006): 320-331. “Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the making of the IAEA,” in John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, eds., Global Power Knowledge: Science, Technology, and International Affairs, in Osiris 21 (July 2006): 25-48. I just received word from MIT Press that it will issue a second edition of my first book, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (1998). I’ve also been organizing (way too many) workshops. Most notably: Technopolitics in Africa. Co-organized with Keith Breckenridge (University of KwaZulu-Natal). Ithala, South Africa, July 2006. SHOT provided the seed funding for this, supplemented by grants from the South African National Research Foundation and the University of Michigan.
Bodies, Networks, Geographies: Colonialism, Development, and Cold War Technopolitics. Organized a set of two workshops: University of Michigan, October 2005 and Eindhoven Technical University (Netherlands), April 2007.
Finally, together with Itty Abraham (University of Texas - Austin) and Willem von Schendel (University of Amsterdam), I’m a series editor for a new book series by Indiana University Press on “Critical International Studies.” Contact me by email if you want to know more about this, and think you might have a manuscript that would fit!
Rebecca Herzig:
I’m currently working on a book-length history of women’s hair removal, which extends some of the themes of suffering and freedom I explored in my most recent book (Suffering for Science, Rutgers University Press, 2005). I would welcome any stray references to techniques of hair removal that WITHies happen to stumble onto!
Susan Schmidt Horning:
After my son’s leap from the nest to Ohio State University last fall, I returned to my second home New York City in January to a new position at St. John’s University in Queens. From 2004 to 2006 I received a Summer/Short-Term Publication Grant from the American Association of University Women Education Foundation, which resulted in an article in Social Studies of Science (December 2004), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in support of her book project, Chasing Sound.
Sharon Irish:
Fields of interest: skyscrapers; reinforced concrete and other building technologies; critical race and feminist theories; performance (in multiple senses of the word). Current project(s): Edited book of interviews with artists, geographers, activists, architects on Critical Spatial Practices (with Nick Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton and Sarah Kanouse) http://www.walkinginplace.org/iprh/index.htm
Annotated bibliography in progress on Race and Space, with Dianne Harris http://cdms.ds.uiuc.edu/Research_CDMS/CriticalWhiteness/Race_and_Space.htm
Possible collaborative project on Cass Gilbert’s reinforced concrete Austin-Nichols Warehouse (1920s) in Brooklyn, NY. I spend a lot of time editing book reviews for H-Urban (online urban history scholarship) and I enjoy occasionally reviewing books and mss for Technology and Culture. Book manuscript on performance artist Suzanne Lacy under consideration at a university press (keep your fingers crossed).
Son about to graduate from high school–Older daughter moves back in!
Pam Laird:
Fields of interest: Business, cultural, and technology history, mostly but not entirely U.S.; Current project(s): The intersection of business, cultural, and political ideologies in 19th- and early 20th-century America.
News I am currently president of the Business History Conference and the most recent recipient of the Harold F. Williamson Prize for mid-career achievement in business history. I also received university awards this year for service and scholarship. Recent good fortune includes receiving promotion to full professor. My second book, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Harvard University Press, 2006) won the 2006 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. I am guest editor of a 2008 special issue on social capital for the British journal, Business History, and I co-edit the University of Pennsylvania Press series “American Business, Politics, and Society.”
Penny Layne:
I am director of the Advance program at Virginia Tech, a National Science Foundation funded program to increase the number of women faculty in the sciences and engineering. I’m also pursuing a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, with a focus on government policies towards women engineers. My background is environmental engineering, especially water and wastewater treatment and hazardous waste cleanup. I’m currently editing a collection of previously published pieces on women in engineering to be published by the American Society of Civil Engineers Press in fall 2008.
Nina Lerman:
Fields of Interest: Teaching: North America (mostly British and US), 17th-19th c; US women’s and gender history; African American history; US race/ethnicity/multiculturalism; various approaches to incorporating history of technology into broad liberal arts curriculum including environmental history (heavy on envirotech), history of industrialization, and my latest: “social history of stuff.” We teach senior research seminars in alternate years — I did a couple of iterations of Gender and Industrialization when the Gender and Tech book was a steady presence in my life, and more recently a late-19th c/ early 20th c seminar trying to get students thinking about intersections, this year called “Labor Question, Woman Question, Race Question” (last time I think I called it “Reinventing the Free Worker,” it had more of a Reconstruction focus).
Research and writing: industrialization, broadly construed — social and cultural choices, meanings, implications as entwined with technological ones. In theory I’m interested in these questions in comparative terms, but so far have not explored them inter- or transnationally, only regionally within the US. So the questions of how technological change is shaped by and then institutionalizes/congeals (as D Noble has written) social systems based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc are the biggies.
The un-dead project on how grown-ups designed and utilized technical education for kids in Philadelphia in the long 19th c might someday see the light of day in its entirety. It has shown recent signs of awakening. One of its spin-off questions, about technological values and race and labor in the US south after slavery was abolished (new race and labor systems had to be re-negotiated, first with very significant black agency and political power and then with increasing white supremacist dominance over a period of several decades, has gotten a bit more attention in the past couple of years, but is potentially huge.
This spring I got to participate in Amy Slaton, Kali Gross, and Keith Wailoo’s workshop on race and SMT — intellectually rich and exciting and she should report more about it. I also got to present some of my thoughts on regionalism and technology in the US (”Jim Crow and the White Way”) at the University of Minnesota last winter — I’m not sure if I succeeded in intriguing anyone there, the balance of context to research problem loomed large, but it was a great gift to me to leave my endlessly undergraduate world and talk to grad students and faculty who have read more recent work in History of Technology than I have had time to do. I’m looking forward to finishing my administrative stint and getting back to my more scholarly ways.
Pam Long:
I am working hard on my book on Roman engineering in the 16th century and recently received an NEH Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship to help with Roman research! Ciao!
Rachel Maines:
News: I have an article forthcoming this spring or summer in the Chronicle of Higher Education review section, on women, veterinary medicine and engineering. My book, Asbestos and Fire: Technological Trade-offs and the Body at Risk was published by Rutgers University Press in 2005, and two more are forthcoming: Hedonizing Technologies (Johns Hopkins University Press), a study of how productions technologies like needlework and woodworking change when artisan pleasure becomes the chief consideration; and Workbasket Technology: Needlework since the Industrial Revolution (Texas Tech University Press). I’ve either written and submitted or am working on articles on early 20th-century cheese factory technology in northern New York; the evolution of consensus standards for theater safety 1881-1935 and another on the same for boiler safety in the same period; plus a study of carbon monoxide as a normal risk. I can’t say that all this has been keeping me out of bars, as my department has a very lively Friday-evening get-together in the Statler cocktail lounge, but at least I’m staying out of pool halls Film version of Technology of Orgasm premiered at the Lincoln Center in NYC on July 28, 2007.
Tiina Männistö-Funk:
Fields of interest: everyday technology, consumption, gender, body. Current project: I am writing my PhD on the history of three everyday technologies in Finland; bicycle, gramophone and camera. This year I have given presentations and/or written articles about the 1929 gramophone fever in Finland, self-made bicycles in Finland and the role of gender in Finnish bicycle riding before the Second World War. I have worked on my PhD since the beginning of this year. Prior to that I worked 1.5 years in the communications department of the Finnish stainless steel company Outokumpu, mainly editing the company magazines. The academic year 2004-2005 I spent at the University of Zürich starting my post-graduate studies and learning about the history of technology, which was a new field for me. My family name changed from Männistö to Männistö-Funk last month as I got married.
Melanie McCalmont:
In addition to geography and science writing, I have a 20+ year career in aerospace. I worked in both military and commercial aviation, and have extensive experience in technical manuals for aircraft. During my graduate work, I built academic websites and wrote technical articles, especially in automotive systems. I am interested in how women acquire and use science knowledge in their everyday lives, and how techniques of science writing have changed when applied to women audiences. I have two manuscripts in progress: one on science and technology protest and one on the history of cartographic relief models. On a personal note, I have a son in the Marine Corps and a younger son at home.
Alan D. Meyer:
Fields of interest: U.S. history; social & cultural history of technology; gender history; gender identity and technology. Current project(s): Dissertation — “Why Fly? A Social and Cultural History of Private Aviation in Post-World War II America.”
#1 News Story: Proud parent of Harrison Causey Meyer (8 lbs 7 ounces, 21 inches), born March 12, 2007. Harrison started solid food in early September and is now just about ready to start crawling. Time to babyproof the house! #2 News Story: Evelyn Douglas Causey (spouse) received her Ph.D. in History, May 2006 [now it’s my turn!]. Other Good News: Recipient, SHOT’s Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship (2005); Recipient, University of Delaware Competitive Graduate Fellowship (2005-2006); and I was hired as a full-time historian with the Federal Government (U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C. area).
I will be co-presenting a paper at SHOT this fall in a panel that I co-organized with Jeremy Kinney of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. In keeping with the 50th anniversary theme, and capitalizing on James Hansen’s review essay/call-to-action “Aviation History in the Wider View” published nearly two decades ago in the July1989 issue of T&C, we will discuss recent historiographical trends and developments in aviation history. In particular, I will be taking a hard look at progress (or lack thereof) in the application of gender history to aviation-related historical subjects.
Dave Morton:
During the last two years or so I have written two books for Greenwood’s reference series in the history of technology. One of them, on the history of sound recording, has been issued in paperback by Johns Hopkins. I continue to translate my academic research into material for my web site, www.recording-history.org, which is aimed at the general public and recording enthusiasts. I am making progress on a book on belief and fringe technologies. I’ve had several different jobs including a couple of adjunct teaching posts, consulting in public relations, and (currently) web application development. To me, the most important event of the last couple of years was my marriage in 2005 to Nan Monahan. She and I live in Atlanta.
Irina Nikiforova:
Fields of interest: history and sociology of science and technology, gender and computing. Current project(s): women and computing.
Ruth Oldenziel:
Currently I am finishing an article with the working title “Islands as Technopolitical Nodes of the American Empire” to be published in an anthology edited by Gabrielle Hecht, Technopolitics of the Cold War (University of Indiana Press).
I am also happy to report that Karin Zachmann and I have just received a contract with MIT for an anthology entitled, Kitchen Politics of the Cold War. Americanization, Technology, and European Users. Eleven American and European authors look at the American kitchen as an artifact and political construct (Nixon-Khurshchev ktichen debate) in juxtaposition to European modernist building traditions. A number of contributions also examine the ways in which the kitchen has been debated, used, and appropriated by users in Europe. If all goes according to schedule it will be announced in the Fall 2008 catalogue.
Starting in September 2007, I have received a three-year ESF Eurocore research grant for “European Ways of Life in ‘the American Century’” within the Inventing Europe Program with the highest ranking. Starting in September 2007, scholars from ten countries will collaborate by looking at the ways American food, leisure, and building practices have been appropriated and reworked. The project is expected to generate numerous articles, an anthology, and a synthetic book I will coauthor with Mikael Hard. In the next newsletter I hope to announce our website, which is currently under construction.
Joy Parr:
Newly remade as a health geographer.
Gabriella Petrick:
I finally finished my Ph.D. I was also awarded one of 7 Humanities Initiative Fellowships for next year. It is for interdisciplinary work in the humanities across the university. I was only one of two people in my school to receive this award. This is the first year of the fellowships and I get a course reduction to 1:1. I’m hoping to get a new chapter for my book complete and another article. I have a JAH article coming out on using the sense of taste to write history. It should be out in March 08. I am also finalizing a book contract with Johns Hopkins, but I haven’t signed yet. That should be done soon.
Sara Pritchard:
Fields of interest: Main areas are history of technology, environmental history, and “Envirotech.” Additional interests in gender & technology, modern France and French empire, historical geography, and risk studies. Current project(s): I am currently completing a book manuscript on the transformation of France’s Rhone River. I am also starting several essays and articles on the intersection of the history of technology and environmental history while considering a new project on water development in France and North Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the short term, I am spending much of my time writing, packing, and moving to Ithaca, NY.
News: I taught the Women’s Studies capstone at Montana State University during the spring 2007 term on “gender and technology in historical perspective.” It was the best undergraduate course that I taught at MSU and I had a fabulous response from the students. It seemed to really strike a chord with many students.
Joan Rothschild:
Despite a cracked rib (don’t ask!), I made my way to the ICOHTEC meetings in Copenhagen in August. I even managed to put together a paper. It was a good meeting focusing on Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice, which brought up a lot of interesting issues about design and its meanings for engineers, architects, and related professions. I followed up the meeting with a visit to friends in Berlin.
Bev Sauer:
Fields of interest: risk communication, management communication, democratic transformation and change, South Africa, coal mine safety training, cross-cultural communication, linguistic anthropology, gesture, multi-modal communication.
News: I’m leaving Johns Hopkins (partially, see footnote below) to take a position in the Management Department of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown. The reasons: Better (ranked) business school, better departmental fit, more full-time colleagues in Business Communication, better teaching, and an opportunity to take MBA students to South Africa for their International Integrative Experience. I’ll eventually be taking over courses in South African history, management, and politics and directing project courses in SA management issues. It’s my ideal job . . .and I don’t have to drive to Baltimore. The partially, footnote: I’ll keep my affiliation with JHU’s School of Public Health, where I have made good friends and good collaborative relationships. The real reason: Georgetown is a really good fit for an international policy wonk.
NSF Grant: The Multi-Modal Dimensions of Risk Communication in Difficult Cross-cultural Contexts: 51 subject interviews in South Africa relating to knowledge of coal mines. Subjects differed across language (Zulu, Afrikaans, English), education, culture, and knowledge of mining. Observation and analysis of coal mine safety training programs in Secunda, SA. If you watch the movie “To Catch a Fire,” you’ll see the mine where I worked. The movie is a great depiction of life in SA under apartheid and the ending is so typically South African and so un-American. It’s wonderful. NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center: Systems Engineering Education and Development (SEED) Program: I’ve extended my work in gesture and risk communication to investigate how systems engineers use gestures to represent their understanding of risk in large systems. I’ve been videotaping a cohort of sub-system engineers as they develop into systems engineers. WV Governor Manchin’s Special Commission on the Sago Mine Disaster: I worked with Davitt McAteer and Associates and wrote the Senate testimony on Automated Mining Machines. This work had a special significance for me and allowed me to apply my research in coal mine explosion training and communication for the public good. U.S. Department Of Transportation, Federal Transit Administration State Safety Oversight.”: My newest project applies the results of my research to State Safety Oversight in the nation’s rail industry. I’ll be presenting a Workshop on Improving Communication in System Safety Oversight at the national workshop in Tampa in May. Current Book Project: I’m working on a book-length manuscript on system safety management, cross-cultural communication, and the processes of democratic transformation in post-apartheid South Africa.
I spent 3.5 weeks this summer in Europe, first with a meeting of the Eastern Academy of Management in Amsterdam, then on to Paris, Mulhouse, Freiburg, Garmisch, and Liechtenstein. I then met up with some friends from W&M for six days of fantastic hiking in the Italian Dolomites. We finished the trip in Venice. The Dolomites are a must-see on all kinds of levels (the food, the food, and, yes, more food). The high point: We visited a Ladino home, learned a bit of Ladino, and cooked home-made ravioli over a wood stove. (Step 1: Buy cow; Step 2, make home-made ricotta….).
Susan Sherwood:
With a grant from the History Channel, Center for Technology & Innovation, Inc. (CT&I) is working with Cornell, the Four County Library system, and local high schools to develop soundscapes of Endicott and Johnson City, two 19th c. industrial villages outside Binghamton in New York’s Southern Tier. The soundscapes will capture the rich texture of an ethnically diverse community that evolved from a late 19th c. shoe manufacturing center to a pioneering nexus of high tech in the mid 20th c. to witness the late 20th c. globalization and job decline.
A veteran team of Linkites are restoring a WWII-era Blue Box flight trainer to operating condition for the Tech Works! Exhibit Prototype Lab. The Blue Box Workshop will be open to the public during Binghamton’s First Friday Gallery Walks, starting November 2007.
From time clocks and card sorters to the Clark Board, a century of Endicott products can be found at the IBM Heritage Center museum, 1401 North Street, Endicott, NY. The collection is on long-term loan to CT&I from IBM, and opens to the public in late 2007/early 2008.
Bayla Singer:
Current project — researching a book with the working title Moving on the Face of the Deep: Ships, People, Civilizations. The general approach will be similar to that of my previous book, Like Sex With Gods: An Unorthodox History of Flying. I’d welcome interesting related tidbits that might otherwise escape my notice, since I’m casting my net pretty widely and basically romping through time and around the world. Personal — do you really want to hear me brag about my grandchildren?
Autumn Stanley:
I am an independent scholar from northern California. Lehigh University Press has sent me a contract for my biography of Charlotte Smith, now tentatively titled Raising More Hell and Fewer Dahlias: The Public Life of Charlotte Smith, 1840-1917. I’ve been working on this book off and on from early in my Mothers & Daughters of Invention research, since Smith was a champion of women inventors, and the driving force behind the Patent Office’s list of 19th-C US women inventors. She also briefly published a periodical called The Woman Inventor in the early 1890s, recommended far-sighted Patent Office reforms to help inventors of both sexes, provided practical help to women inventors through a group announced in the periodical, and tried to establish a permanent exposition of women’s industrial and inventive work in Washington, DC. I am the author of Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology, available from Scarecrow Press (hardcover).
Jytte Thorndahl:
I am a curator at the Danish Museum of Electricity. Fields of interest: Electrification of Denmark, history of wind power, women and technology. Current projects: Exhibition on history of Wind power in Denmark, digital project ‘Time trip of the home’ - historic houses for schoolchildren.
Books: Jytte Thorndahl: Gedsermoellen - den foerste moderne vindmølle. Skrifter fra Elmuseet nr. 15, 2005; Forthcoming book (June 2007): Hanne Thomsen & Jytte Thorndahl: El og gas til danske kommuner. Elmuseet og Gasmuseet, 2007. (On the community owned production and distribution of electricity and gas in Danish cities 1850-1980). I do museum work, administration, collection work, guided tours, talks, and exhibition work. I have a granddaughter, Frida, born in 2006. I also recorded a new CD with my folk music band, due out in 2007.
Martha Trescott:
I have offered to fund a prize or grant in SHOT for the 50th anniversary on social responsibility in engineering history in honor of three mentors of mine: Edwin T. Layton, Jr., Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., and Thomas P. Hughes. I also suggested an update for the SHOT membership form so that members can pledge, over several years’ time, to the T & C editorship. I myself have committed funds for this in honor of the three SHOT founders mentioned above. Maybe, in time, I can endow a grant and/or the T &C editorship, when we can get the legal details worked out. (For WITH’s 50th, I hope to do something similar, to set up a WITH prize)
It is my wish to honor Ed, Carroll and Tom for their contributions to my career and for their many intellectual contributions to the study of the social and ethical dimensions of engineering and technological change in history. I really cannot overestimate what their help has meant. Nor can I say enough about the help of Paul Uselding in my career, and I plan to let the BHC know about that, too. (He was such a fine editor of the BEH for so long that I would like to help the BEH editorship in his honor, too, and think he might appreciate that the most.) As a fine historian of technology, as well as being an excellent business historian, he can certainly be listed in this honor at this time, too. I do want to say, too, that I greatly appreciate all the help Steve Usselman has given me in considering my gift and the various options for it. It has taken a good bit of his time at this busy time. I appreciate the help of others he consulted with, too.
Ongoing work: I am revising a paper on Ellen Swallow Richards for a journal in the field of education which often publishes historical pieces. I was also asked to write a paper on the use of role models in the classroom, drawing on my 25-year study of the history of women in engineering. Also, I was asked to help with another project on role models using excerpts from the actual tapes of the 100+ interviews I did with early women engineers. I continue with some interviews, at times, of women in engineering, and I’m continuing to work in my archives of this project, trying to get them ready for an appropriate repository (several institutions have expressed an interest) and also on papers concerning individual women engineers and entrepreneurs I interviewed. I still need to get the interviews I did in Latin America completely translated but ran out of money! (That will require more grant funding when I can get to it!)
Julie Wosk:
My exhibit, “Alluring Androids, Robot Women, and Electronic Eves” (digital images of artificial women in film, photography, computer games, and art) was held at the New York Hall of Science, June-September 2006. The exhibit catalogue will be published early next year, and the exhibit is available for travel to other venues. For information, contact Julie Wosk.