ELECTIONS

The 2010 ballot is located following the candidate biographies. Online balloting is available through the SHOT website and the link to the online ballot is http://www.historyoftechnology.org/cgi-bin/2010_shot_vote.cgi. You need to enter your membership number to vote for security reasons only; your ballot is still anonymous in the results database. Your membership number is located above your name on the mailing label of the newsletter and there is also information on the website regarding how to obtain your membership number from Johns Hopkins University Press.

You may alternatively return the paper ballot from the printed newsletter. Please note that, as with previous years, faxed copies will not be accepted. The deadline for submitting ballots is September 11, 2009.

The Executive Council is SHOT’s governing board and works with the Society’s officers to plan and set policy. The Nominating Committee is responsible for selecting individuals to run for office and preparing the slate of candidates for each year’s election. The Editorial Committee works with the editor of Technology and Culture in addressing questions relating to the operation of the journal. Members of the council and these committees serve for three-year terms.

VICE PRESIDENT (PRESIDENT-ELECT)

Miriam Levin:It is a great honor to be nominated to run for the office of Vice President/President. I’ve belonged to SHOT for many years, and would be proud to serve if elected. At last year’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh, I reminisced with a colleague about the first SHOT meeting I attended--also in Pittsburgh--in 1986. As a recently minted Ph.D. on the job market, I attended the reception where I was warmly welcomed by Mel Kranzberg and found intellectual kindred in the 200 plus participants whose enthusiasm for the history of technology I shared. SHOT gave us agency, and we were the engine for furthering its scholarly objectives. Three years later I joined Carroll Pursell at Case Western Reserve University to teach history of European technology in the new program he directed in the History Department there. I was hooked on SHOT.

Between then and now, I have served on the Program Committee, the Robinson and Dibner Prize committees, and was Program Chair for the 1997 meeting in Pasadena. I have also represented SHOT at the National Humanities Alliance, and attended WITH, the Mercurians, and the Museum special interest groups. I’ve organized a variety of SHOT sessions on technology and modernity, international expositions, history of European technology, engineering education, and grant writing panels. Cultures of Control (Rutledge: 2000), a volume of essays I edited, was inspired by a theme that emerged from papers I heard at a SHOT meeting whose authors then generously contributed to the collection. Through SHOT I came to know colleagues working on a number of projects, including the Tensions of Europe, the research group in Paris working on the history of engineering education, and scholars in Lisbon and Évora in Portugal.

Then as now, the Society played an important role in making it possible to exchange new ideas with scholars from all over the globe working in the history of technology. It offered a forum where social construction, actor network and development constructs for analyzing technological change were introduced and received critical feedback. SHOT also encouraged scholars (including graduate students) who study non-Western cultures and Western colonial contacts, and brokered exchanges among scholars of U.S., European and Asian history of technology. It has also been an important organization in enabling the study of technology’s past to make its mark on the public’s consciousness. Today, SHOT is truly an international scholarly organization, its members working on topics that are often global in perspective, its membership increasingly a healthy mix of scholars from North America, Europe, Asia, South Asia, with movement towards increasing representation from the Middle East and Africa.

So why tangle with success? Whither SHOT? As scholars there is always the itch to understand more, in new ways, to clear new ground. But there are practical reasons as well to integrate our work into the forefront of current historical research and historically illuminate contemporary global issues. This need is brought home to me particularly because I teach in a history department where history of technology is recognized as integral to the undergraduate and graduate history curriculum. Like many history departments these days, we decided to emphasize a global perspective in hiring decisions, as well as course offerings. This has entailed what I see as a healthy recognition that relationships among different peoples, rulers, governments and cultures were enabled by technology, but also that politics and diplomacy have affected decisions about technological exchanges resulting in uneven and distinctive national development.

In this context, having extended geographically, SHOT is poised to encourage studies and conference panels that compare national systems of development, or differences and similarities among colonial and post-colonial experiences in the transfers and receptions of technology. Such comparisons might be done from the increasingly vital perspectives of foreign relations and policy studies, inviting scholars from these disciplines to contribute to our meetings and linking us to their societies and journals. Hence, following the relationships we have with HSS, SSS, and AHA, we should work to organize sessions at meetings of the Society for History of American Foreign Relations and the Policy History Conference in the United States and at similar organizations in Europe and Asia.

There is also the public orientation of SHOT to consider. Museums of science and industry have been the sites where the rubber meets the road so to speak in the form of public exhibits about technology curated by scholars in the field. In addition, museums have traditionally been research sites for us, repositories of artifacts and documents, employers of historians of technology. Our members who work at the Smithsonian, the MIT Museum, the Deutches Museum, the Musée national des techniques, or the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, to name only a few, are thoroughly versed in the workings of these institutions. Today, museums are also institutions figuring in economic development strategies, tourism culture, and broader heritage preservation agendas. UNESCO has put its weight behind the development of heritage studies programs and internships that in effect turn historic sites and entire cities into museums, including industrial and ancient workshop sites. Interested SHOT members should be supported in re-thinking technology museums in light of these changes, so that we may continue to educate the public about the history of technology, maintain valuable research collections, preserve sites, and find positions for our graduates. We should also consider reaching out to the American Museum Association and UNESCO’s World Heritage Center to engage them in discussions about how to include the history of technology and technological heritage.

There is more than organizational self-interest at stake here for SHOT. The old cultural fault line in education that separates science/technology from the humanities is more apparent than ever. This was brought home by the June 7, 2010 New York Times op-ed piece on the subject. Here Stanley Fish reviewed philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s assessment that what is happening is that the “’humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative and creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground’ as the humanities and the arts ‘are being cut away’ and dismissed as “useless frills” in the context of an overriding imperative ‘to stay competitive in the global market.’ The result is that ‘abilities crucial to the health of any democracy’ are being lost . . . “ Missing here and in proposed remedies, however, is recognition that history provides a natural integration of what has been artificially divided. More to the point, the history of technology is a discipline that offers a significant corrective because it is one in which the divide doesn’t exist. From its inception in 1958, SHOT’s mission has been to encourage the study of the development of technology and its relations with society and culture. Continuing to work towards these ends seems very worthwhile.

Bruce Seely earned his Ph.D. in the history of technology at the University of Delaware in 1982, and since then he has almost continuously been involved with SHOT. From 1990-1995, he served as secretary and newsletter editor, was elected to on the executive council in 1998, and served on numerous other committees, including the 50th Anniversary Planning Committee (for which he wrote the NSF proposal that funded the 50th Anniversary Workshop), the Ferguson Prize Development Committee (2004), the Secretary Search Committee (2003), the Ad hoc Committee on Journal Publisher (1997), the Kranzberg Prize Selection Committee (1996-97), and the Usher Prize Committee (twice). He has presented papers, chaired, and commented at annual meetings often, having never missed a meeting since joining SHOT in 1976. Bruce received the Usher Prize in 1987 for his article "The Scientific Mystique in Engineering: Highway Research in the Bureau of Public Roads, 1918-1940," published in T&C in October 1984. The topics of Bruce‘s research have been eclectic, and the iron and steel industry, the history of engineering and engineering education, the history of American highways and railroad transportation, and the societal implications of nanoscale science and engineering. The last subject grew directly from the two years he spent as the program officer for science and technology studies at the National Science Foundation (2000-2002). He has been at Michigan Technological University since 1986, and currently is the dean of the College of Sciences and Arts.

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL

Erik Conway: I’ve been a SHOT member since 1995, shortly after I started graduate school in the University of Minnesota’s Program in the History of Science and Technology. I’ve worked almost entirely outside academia since completing the Ph.D. in 1998, as a NASA contract historian from 1999-2005, and as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s historian since 2004. I was the founding editor of the Envirotech Newsletter, and have been glad to see that initiative prosper in the years since I stepped down. I’ve now published five books: High Speed Dreams, a history of NASA research into supersonic transportation; Blind Landings, a history of aircraft landing aid development based on my dissertation; Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History, an effort to understand the historical evolution of one of NASA’s more Earthly endeavors; and two co-authored works, a Exploration and Science, with Michael Reidy and Gary Kroll; and most recently, with Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt.

My most recent work has explored the triple-junction of history of technology, history of science, and history of environmental politics. I’m active in the History of Science Society (and an advisory editor of Isis), and if elected I intend to work towards improved relations between the two societies.

Kenji Ito is an Associate Professor of the Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Japan. There, he trains Ph. D.s in science studies and teaches STS to biology graduate students. He earned his PhD in 2002 at Harvard, where he worked with Peter L. Galison. The main area of his research is the history of physical sciences and technology in 20^th century Japan. In particular, he published on the history of robotics and computer games in Japan in the following articles: “Robots, A-Bombs, and War: Cultural Meanings of Science and Technology in Japan around World War II,” in Robert Jacobs, ed., Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb, Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 63-98; “Possibilities of Non-Commercial Games: The Case of Amateur Role-Playing Games Designers in Japan,” Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson eds., Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital Games Research, Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 129-142. He is currently working on a paper on the images of robots in Japanese popular culture during the occupation and on a book project on the emergence of modern physics in Japan.

I am greatly honored to be nominated for an Executive Council candidate. Although the history of technology is my secondary field of research, being awarded an International Scholar of SHOT in 2003 and a SHOT travel grant in 2004, I have been impressed and indebted by SHOT’s effort to support young scholars and incorporate overseas researchers. If elected to the Executive Council, I hope I could bring new perspectives to SHOT through my knowledge on cultural impacts of recent technologies in Asia, as they, for example, appear in popular cultures such as comics and games. If SHOT is to expand its activities in Asia, I would help build a stronger relationship with relevant academic communities in the region.

Finn Arne Jørgensen is an Associate Senior Lecturer (tenure track) in the history of science, technology, and environment at Umeå University in Sweden. I received my PhD from Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2007 and did a postdoc there from 2008 to 2010. I spent a year as a visiting researcher in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at beautiful University of Virginia in 2005–2006. My first book, More than a Hole in the Wall: The Story of What We Do With Our Bottles and Cans will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2011 and I am currently working on a book-length manuscript on the history of the Norwegian leisure cabin.

I went to my first SHOT meeting in Amsterdam in 2004 – where I also met my wonderful wife – and I have been to every meeting since. I’ve been a SHOT International Scholar (2005–2007), served on the Robinson Prize committee 2007–2009 (the last year as chair), and SHOT awarded me the Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize in 2009. Many of you will know my name from the H-Sci-Med-Tech mailing list, where I have been an editor since 2008. While I’ve been to many conferences the last few years, SHOT is where I feel the most at home, a place where I can come to hear interesting papers, get stimulating feedback, and meet friends from all over the world. SHOT has succeeded admirably in becoming an open and welcoming international organization, and I believe that we need to keep growing the organization in this direction.

In addition to my SHOT involvement, I am a board member of the European Society of Environmental History since 2009 and founded the Nordic Environmental History Network (NEHN). My research focuses on the intersection between history of technology and environmental history, especially the histories of technical infrastructures for consumer interactions with nature and environmentalism. I’ve been mostly concerned with waste management, recycling, and nature tourism the last few years. To support this interest, I have been an active member of the Envirotech Special Interest Group in SHOT for several years.

I believe that my broad international and organizational experience can contribute to SHOT. I especially want to strengthen the ties between SHOT and the international environmental history communities. I also want to work on improving SHOT’s online presence, a process which has begun but which will need continual refinement and further development.

Rachel Maines: I am a Visiting Scientist in Cornell University’s College of Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Until 2009 I was a Visiting Scholar in Cornell’s Department of Science and Technology Studies. I am the author of The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” Vibrators and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), which was made into a documentary film by Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori in 2007, and adapted as a play by Sara Ruhl in 2008. My more recent books are Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk (Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Hedonizing Technologes: Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). I am currently working on a book about the history of consensus engineering codes and standards in industrial democracies, and collaborating with my husband Garrel Pottinger on a book about military and hazard-protection uses of textiles.

My associations with SHOT and WITH go back more than 30 years, to 1976, when Daryl Hafter invited me to give a paper at the SHOT meeting at Smithsonian. At the time, I had only a bachelor’s degree in Classics, but at the SHOT meeting I met Joel Tarr of Carnegie-Mellon University, who encouraged me to get my doctorate in CMU’s Applied History Program. A Technology and Society fellowship made this possible. While at CMU I met and fell in love with philosopher Garrel Pottinger, who is familiar to many of you as a military history buff who has been attending SHOT meetings with me for the last several decades. SHOT and WITH gave me my intellectual direction in life, setting me on the path to a life of scholarship at the age of 26. As a member of the Executive Council, I would work to keep this strong emphasis on the encouragement of young scholars, and to continue extending our international organizational welcome to those in related fields.

Martin V. Melosi is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. In 2000-01, he was the Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He also is past president of the Urban History Association, American Society for Environmental History, National Council on Public History, and the Public Works Historical Society. His major areas of research include urban, environmental, energy, and public policy history, and the history of technology. Melosi is the author or editor of seventeen books and more than 70 articles and book chapters. Among his works is the prize-winning (including the Edelstein prize) The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000). Statement: SHOT has been a leader among academic organizations in extending its global reach on a consistent basis. This has led to a broadening and deepening of our understanding of the field. I would like for us to commit the same energy to further connecting with colleagues in other historical disciplines—like environmental history, for example—and with colleagues in the various social sciences. This will require greater effort to develop exchanges at annual meetings, exploration of cooperative research agendas, and various other means to promote intellectual cooperation and consultation.

Joy Parr: I came to the history of technology by way of economics at McGill

and economic history at Yale. From 2001 I served variously as an advisory, special issue and contributing editor to Technology and Culture and on the Kranzberg Prize Committee. I won the Usher prize in 2001 for an article about how users’ and designers’ responses to differing resource availability informed the design of domestic technologies. From 2004 to 2007 I enjoyed the good fellowship of colleagues as Co-Chair with Betsy Mendelsohn of ENVIROTECH, the special interest group which bridges the American Society for Environmental History and the Society for the History of Technology. After working on manufacturing and domestic technologies, and water and nuclear power generation, I’m turning now to the local and geo- politics of air and water quality and the environmental legacies of industry. I’m invested in finding ways for junior and international scholars, and for those not securely employed, to participate in our conferences and our Society. Recently we made good headway on these fronts, but these are challenges may be more demanding in the next three years.

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Roberta J. Magnusson is Associate Professor of History, University of Oklahoma. She has worked as field archaeologist in England and Italy and earned Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (2001) and book chapters on medieval hydraulic technology, with an emphasis on Italy and England. She is currently doing research for a book on urbanization and public infrastructures (bridges, roads, city walls, water systems, and port facilities) in medieval England.

Statement: SHOT plays a key role for historians of technology, both a venue for the dissemination of international research and as a forum for the development and refinement of theoretical models of technological change. As someone whose own work on medieval technology has been strongly influenced by SHOT, I would like to encourage the commitment to reach out to scholars who work on pre-industrial and traditional technologies. A greater awareness of the sophisticated theoretical approaches that are used in the study of modern technologies has the potential to stimulate new approaches in the study of pre-modern cultures. In turn, our dialogue on the complex interrelationships between technology and culture will benefit if more voices from scholars who work on societies where technological change is resisted, or where the pace of change is best measured on a scale of centuries rather than years are included in the conversation. A greater knowledge of technology in the pre-industrial and pre-capitalist centuries will help us all better understand the context for the rapid social and technical changes of the modern world, and provide a “testing ground” for refining models of technological change.

Thomas Misa is at the University of Minnesota, where he directs the Charles Babbage Institute, teaches in the graduate program in the history of science, technology, and medicine, and is ERA Chair in the History of Technology in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has served on six SHOT committees, as well as the Executive Council, most recently as chair of the T&C search committee. He has published four edited volumes including Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, coedited with Mikael Hård (MIT 2008) and Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing (Wiley/IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010). He is author of A Nation of Steel and Leonardo to the Internet, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

If elected to the Editorial Committee, I would like to explore two possibilities for enhancing SHOT’s profile as the preeminent scholarly society in our field. With Project MUSE becoming a significant stream of revenue for the society as a whole, we need to think creatively about expanding T&C’s presence in the electronic world, especially Wikipedia. And with the deepening “crisis of scholarly publishing,” we need to think carefully about new options and possibilities such as publication-on-demand models as alternatives to traditional scholarly presses.

NOMINATING COMMITTEE

Susan Schmidt Horning: I am an assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in New York City where I teach global and American history, history of technology and science, and popular culture. I am a cultural historian of technology and sound studies and my research focuses on the interplay of technology, engineering, music and sound recording. I have published articles on my research, which has been supported by the NSF and NEH, and I am currently completing my first book, Chasing Sound. I studied with Carroll Pursell at Case Western Reserve University, where I took my Ph.D. in 2002, and have been a member of SHOT for 17 years. I have been an advisory editor of Technology and Culture since 2006 and I served on the IEEE Life Members’ Prize Committee from 2007-2009. I am a member of the Women in Technology History SIG and joined the WITH Travel Award Committee in 2009. In 1996, I joined the International Committee for the History of Technology and served on the Program Committee of ICOHTEC from 2003-2006. I have been a member of the Email Special (ICOHTEC jazz band, led by Hans-Joachim Braun) since its formation in 1996 and have enjoyed the collegiality and convivial atmosphere of our post-conference gigs, a great way of socializing and getting to know society members better.

I have enjoyed tremendous support and encouragement from both SHOT and ICOHTEC throughout my academic career and if elected to the Nominating Committee, I would continue the tradition of encouraging graduate students and nominating younger scholars from the U.S. and internationally to positions in SHOT.

Johan Schot is professor in social history of technology at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He is research director of the Foundation for the History of Technology, and of the Foundation for System Innovation and Transitions towards Sustainable Development. Between 2000- 2003 he served as member of the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology, and he organised the 2004 SHOT conference in Amsterdam. He is a fellow of the N.W. Posthumus Institute for social and economic history. He is co-founder and chairing (with Ruth Oldenziel) the Tensions of Europe Collaborative Network and Research Program (see www.tensionsofeurope.eu). He was the program leader and main editor of the research program and book series on the History of Technology in the Netherlands in the 20th century. In 2009 he was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His teaching, research and publications range from history of technology, science and technology studies, European history to transitions and sustainability studies. He co-edited Technology and the Making of the Netherlands, The Age of Contested Modernization, 1890-1970 with MIT in 2010, and co-authored Transitions to Sustainable Development. New Directions in the Study of Long Term Transformative Change with Routledge in 2010. See also wwww.sustainabilitytransitions.com.