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October 7th, 2023

SHOT Elections 2023 – Vote now

Vote online (members only) until 25 October 2023 via the ONLINE BALLOT.
(for information on (e-)mail voting see below)

Download the SHOT 2023 Election Newsletter in PDF format.

President’s Message

Dear SHOT Members, Dear SHOT community,

Many of us will see each other in just a few weeks at our annual meeting in Los Angeles, on the campus of the University of Southern California! You’ll find information about the meeting logistics in this newsletter and on our website, which we’ll continue to update with hotel and other information.
In the meantime, we have a brief but important collective task: voting for the next cohort of SHOT members to conduct our collective business. This includes candidates for the Executive Council and a few other committees. The tumult of this year shows the importance of having a broad spectrum of representatives on whom we can count when the going gets rough. We had an exceptionally strong turnout for the meeting poll; it would be wonderful to see the same turnout for this election! Please read candidate bios and vote by 25 October. This will enable us to stay on track for our July 2024 meeting in Chile. We will announce the results Los Angeles.
The conference officially launches with a sparkling opening plenary on rethinking epistemic and methodological approaches to the relationships between technology and modernity. We’ll have plenty more to choose from over the subsequent two days. As noted on the program, two threads will be in hybrid format each day; we’ll also have a couple of online-only sessions in early morning slots (California time). Don’t miss the community meeting on Friday evening, when we’ll update you on last year’s accomplishments and next year’s plans and listen to your ideas and feedback.
I can’t wait to see you all!

With very best wishes,
Gabrielle Hecht, SHOT President

SHOT Elections 2023

This year’s ballot includes candidates for the Executive Council, Secretary, Treasurer, Nominating Committee, and Editorial Committee. Please note that only SHOT members are allowed to vote.

Vote online until 25 October 2023 via the ONLINE BALLOT.
(for information on (e-)mail voting see below)

2023 SHOT Ballot

Executive Council (3 positions – 6 candidates)

Adewumi Damilola Adebayo

I am honored to be nominated for election to the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of History at York University, Canada. My research interests include science, technology, and the environment, with reference to Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria, since the precolonial period. I am completing my first book, tentatively entitled Power and the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Nigeria. It investigates the evolution and impact of electrification in Nigeria from its preparatory stages in Lagos’s classrooms during the 1860s, through colonial rule and independence (1960), the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), to the eve of the OPEC-led international oil boom in the early 1970s. A study spanning more than 100 years of electrification, my book firmly establishes the African agency in economic and technical planning, financing, and consumption.
I am proud to have been associated with SHOT during the last seven years. I was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge when I joined SHOT in 2017. I was a new entrant into the profession and was seeking a scholarly home. It was an incredible stroke of luck to have won the Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship during my first year of membership. As I noted in the acknowledgment section of that dissertation, the Fellowship was the most significant validation of my work up to that time.
From St. Louis to Long Beach, through Milan and New Orleans, SHOT has given me career-advancing opportunities and a platform to contribute my quota to promoting non-Western histories of technology. I regularly present papers and have co-organized sessions at SHOT meetings. I organized a small academic conference at Cambridge in 2019 with SHOT’s financial support. I have received invitations to participate in collaborative research projects through colleagues that I first met at SHOT meetings. A topic dear to my heart is the state of African histories of science and technology in university classrooms. With SHOT support, I co-convened a presidential roundtable on the subject in New Orleans, and I am now looking forward to producing a comprehensive reader to guide graduate students and instructors.
I currently serve as the inaugural co-chair of SHOT’s Africa Initiative Committee. I am also a member of the Selection Committee for Global Communities Scholars. If elected, it would be a pleasure to continue my service to SHOT by working with other members of the Executive Council to create more opportunities for early career scholars, enhance networking and professional development programs for scholars in non-Western institutions, and promote the history of technology initiatives globally.

Matthew N. Eisler

I am a historian of science and technology in the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where I teach and research questions relating to energy, environment, public policy, and industrial-technological innovation. I have written two books (Overpotential: Fuel Cells, Futurism, and the Making of a Power Panacea, Rutgers University Press, 2012; and Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car, MIT Press, 2022) and a number of articles. I try to make my research accessible to public audiences and have published in popular media platforms including Physics Today, Slate, and IEEE Spectrum. I currently sit on the editorial advisory board of IEEE Spectrum (2022-2025).
It is a privilege to be nominated to the ballot for the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology, an organization I consider my disciplinary home. I joined SHOT in 2005, presenting at many of the society’s annual conferences and organizing several panels since then. I have published in Technology & Culture and served as chair (2016-2017) and member (2015, 2018) of the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize Committee and as a member of the Da Vinci Prize Committee (2017).
Although I trained as a historian, earning a doctoral degree in this discipline at the University of Alberta (2008), I have explored interdisciplinary approaches in research and teaching. I spent much of my early career in organizations outside the traditional history/humanities department including the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UCSB, the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute), the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia, and the STS program at NC State University, where I served as interim director of STS (2016-2017). In this period, I encountered diverse worldviews, ways of knowing, and methods that caused me to question my assumptions and continually review (and often revise) my modes of teaching and research. I try to maintain this reflexive critical approach in my current work.
If elected to the EC, I would bring this experience in contributing to SHOT’s longstanding efforts to build an inclusive and tolerant community to the highest standards of scholarship and ethical probity.

Per Högselius

I am a professor of history of technology. Based at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, I mainly devote myself to transnational history of technology and its intersection with environmental and cultural history. My research projects have spanned themes such as European and global energy history, natural resource extraction in colonial settings, transnational infrastructures in their cultural and political context, coastal history and various studies of the Baltic Sea region as a transnational historical space. At times I’ve been more oriented towards the deeper past, at other times towards the burning issues of our own era. I have always seen it as a main task to integrate studies of past and present. Currently I focus on two research projects: first, NUCLEARWATERS, which is an ERC project that aims to renarrate the global history of nuclear energy through the lens of water, and secondly, a project called Carbon Transnationalism, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which analyses how coal extraction and distribution shaped Interwar Europe. My books include a diverse mix of titles, including The Dynamics of Innovation in Eastern Europe (2005), Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence (2013), Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (2016, co-authored with Arne Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten, part of the Making Europe Book Series), the textbook Energy and Geopolitics (2019), and most recently The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: An Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (2023).
I started attending SHOT meetings as a PhD student in the early 2000s, and I remember each of them with joy. I have served in the Robinson Prize committee and the Sally Hacker Prize committee, while also contributing to Technology & Culture as an author, book reviewer, and peer-reviewer. It would be an honor to serve in SHOT’s Executive Council. I’m impressed by SHOT’s recent work on diversity, inclusion, and internationalization, which are challenges to which I hope to further contribute. Linked to this, I would like to promote, through SHOT, a history of technology that exploits the potential of co-authorship and team-based work to a greater extent than what has traditionally been the case in the historical disciplines. Last but not least, I’m eager to promote a problem-oriented history of technology that engages with the public debate. I am a positive person, but the world is, frankly, in a mess, and it is my conviction that historians of technology can play a creative role in building a better tomorrow.

Diana J. Montaño

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis. I am a cultural historian of modern Mexico with a focus on the twentieth century. The core of my intellectual endeavor is how Mexicans have imagined, adopted, adapted, built, deployed, and experienced technologies in constructing their society. While I have worked extensively in Mexico City, my broader emphasis on the histories of technological networks seeks to uncover connections among the movement of ideas, machinery, capital, and individuals, as well as the transformations the latter unleashed. My research is historical, grounded, and multilingual. My first monograph, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (University of Texas Press, 2021), is a cultural, social, and political history of how residents of Mexico City shaped the electrification of their spaces from the 1880s to the 1960s. Specifically, it captures residents’ fluid and textured relationship to electricity in all its complexity. My current project looks at the construction of the Necaxa hydroelectric complex at the turn of the twentieth century. In it, I adopt a transnational framework to study the interrelationship of technology and nature and an interdisciplinary lens that bridges science and technology studies to histories of engineering, labor, and Indigenous communities, environmental studies, and critical infrastructure studies. This second monograph explores the question at the center of my scholarly trajectory– how the energetic lives of Mexicans are central to understanding the country’s quest for modernity–through the category of displacement. Documenting the displacement of ideas, bodies, techniques, capital, and machinery across borders facilitates the transnational analysis crucial to study the history of energy and modernity.
My work on these topics has appeared in Technology and Culture, Hispanic American Historical Review, Technology’s Stories, and History of Technology. I am also co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press’ book series Confluencias on Mexican history.
SHOT has been my intellectual home since 2019. I am honored to be nominated for election to the Executive Council and look forward to contributing to shaping our field’s conversations, particularly the effort to expand networks with our Latin American colleagues who are pushing the field’s boundaries in exciting ways. I look forward to doing my part in duplicating intellectual exchanges and collaborative endeavors. I thank you in advance for considering my nomination.

Fabian Prieto-Ñañez

My journey with SHOT began in 2016 when the Society sponsored my trip to a Graduate Workshop in Singapore. This experience solidified my commitment to this scholarly community. Transitioning from my Ph.D. in Media Studies to my current position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech was fundamentally marked by the guidance and support I received from SHOT, which helped shape my academic focus and establish my identity as a historian of technology.
Right now, I’m in the process of completing my book manuscript, ‘Pirates of Starry Nights,’ which examines the impact of amateur satellite dishes in the Caribbean, Central America, and the U.S. My interdisciplinary research combines legislative, entrepreneurial, and technical insights to challenge traditional histories of innovation, emphasizing the vital life of technologies in often-underrepresented regions. The Business History Conference with the Martha Moore Trescott Prize in 2021 honored a portion of this research.
In my role as an educator, I offer courses such as ‘Innovation in Context’ and ‘Introduction to Technology and Race’, emphasizing historical thinking as a tool for students to understand systemic inequalities in the U.S. and worldwide. To broaden this understanding, I invite guest speakers from Latin America to present their work and perspectives, encouraging students to consider how knowledge is produced in different geographical contexts.
As a Colombian scholar based in a U.S. institution, I contribute a trans-hemispheric perspective that enhances our collective understanding of the imbalances inherent in global knowledge production. If elected to the Executive Council, I aim to continue embedding this multidisciplinary and international perspective into SHOT’s governance. Inspired by projects like the Bibliography for Making AntiRacist History of Technology, I plan to encourage broader conversations about pedagogical methodologies, enhancing the link between SHOT’s academic community and the general public.
Serving on the Executive Council would be a significant honor, allowing me to contribute to a community that has profoundly influenced my academic journey. I am committed to nourishing and expanding the scope of the History of Technology, a commitment deeply informed by my enriching experiences as a member of SHOT. Thank you for considering my nomination.

Magdalena Zdrodowska

I am an Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. I work at the intersection of the history of technology and deaf and disability studies. I have curated interdisciplinary sessions and panels at conferences organized by SHOT, International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), and  MAH: Media Art History, bringing together scholars and approaches from history of technology, cultural studies, art and literary studies, and disability studies. I also do this in the classroom – most recently during the summer school “Disability, Participation, and Activism” that I co-organized at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I am co-chair of the international research network Disability Studies in Eastern Europe – Reconfigurations. In 2021 I published the book Telephone, Cinema, and Cyborgs. The Relations of Deafness and Technology (in Polish), which focuses on deaf agency and innovation. My most recent publication, “Thrice Precious Tube!” Negotiating the Visibility and Efficiency of Early Hearing Aids” (2023, Journal of Design History), explores the intersections of technology, design, and disability. I first presented it as a work-in-progress at the SHOT 2019 conference, which served as a wonderful “laboratory” for developing the concept of hearing aid visibility. Since 2017, I have been involved with ICOHTEC, for which I have served as a member of the Executive Committee (2019-2023), a tutor at the Summer School in Katowice meeting (2019), and the Chair of the Program Committee for the Tallinn/Tartu meeting (2023). This diverse experience gives me confidence that I will be able to fulfill similar roles for other communities.
I am honored to run for a seat on the SHOT Executive Council. I have been a member of the SHOT community since the 2019 conference in Milan. Since then, I have participated in all subsequent SHOT annual conferences, wearing various hats: as a presenter, as a panel co-organizer, and as a participant in WITH/EDITH sessions and workshops. In 2020, I was recognized as a SHOT International Scholar. I am also proud of my collaboration with Technology and Culture. This year, I am serving as Associate Chair of the Program Committee for the 2024 SHOT-ICOHTEC Joint Meeting in Viña del Mar, Chile.
I value the SHOT meetings and the behind-the-scenes work of its members in providing the academic community with guidelines, syllabi, and reference lists that push the boundaries of the discipline and strive to broaden the notion of who we read, discuss in class, and consider inventors, makers, and experts. If elected, I would like to focus on strengthening SHOT’s agenda with approaches and voices from the peripheries, such as disability or Eastern European perspectives – just as I try to complement disability studies and Eastern European studies with histories of technology.

Secretary

Jan Korsten

I have been serving as SHOT secretary since 2017. I am the business director of the Foundation for the History of Technology (SHT), which is based at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. As historian I worked among others on projects and books about Dutch farmers organizations, the history of a large insurance company, local banks, and the role of the Chamber of Commerce in the Dutch province of Brabant. In collaboration with researchers from the four Dutch universities of technology I am currently involved in setting up a new center for the history of technology. This center will start in 2024. Main focus of the international (research) programs of the center will be: technology and the twin green and digital transitions in historical perspective.
In my first term as secretary I ran the in-person meetings in Philadelphia (2017), St, Louis (2018), Milan (2019), and New Orleans (2022), and managed to make the conference finances more transparent. I worked with the other officers to steer SHOT through the COVID years and other challenges. Together with a dedicated conference organizing team we managed to successfully move the 2020 and 2021 annual meetings online. Also we started thinking on the future setup of our annual meetings.
As SHOT secretary I want to make sure that SHOT is an efficient, transparent, and open organization. An international society where scholars from all over the world feel at home. I am convinced that building and maintaining a global community is crucial for the future of our field and SHOT.

Treasurer

Amy Bix

Amy Bix has been serving as SHOT treasurer since 2019. She is professor of history at Iowa State University and researches a variety of topics in the history of technology; her book, Girls Coming to Tech: A History of American Engineering Education for Women, won the History of Science Society’s 2015 Margaret Rossiter Prize. Bix served as SHOT secretary for five years in the early 2000s, handling organization operations and the management of annual meetings, including the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations. Bix has also served on the SHOT Executive Council, the SHOT Finance Committee, and a number of other SHOT administrative and awards committees.
During her first term as treasurer, Bix worked with SHOT secretary Jan Korsten and president Gabrielle Hecht to set up a new multi-year budget scheme. Bix also updated other elements of the treasurer’s office work and worked with other officers to steer SHOT through the COVID years and other challenges. Bix also arranged for SHOT to work with professional accountants specializing in non-profit management; this saves SHOT money and positions us better to appeal to future donors and grant agencies. We also hope that having professional accounting will make the treasurer’s job less difficult and thus more appealing to future treasurers. In her second term as treasurer, Bix aims to compile a full treasurer’s office emergency/succession plan, to keep updating SHOT’s financial procedures for efficiency, and to keep refining the mutli-year budget process to offer more fiscal transparency and improve initiative planning.

Nominations Committee (1 position – 2 candidates)

Harro Maat

I am an associate professor at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group of Wageningen University, where I teach in international development programmes that attract engaged and energetic students  from all over the world. My research focuses on technologies for crop improvement, mostly situated in colonial and post-colonial contexts, and its implications for ecology, food and health. Of particular interest are local skill and technique developed by local communities, often working against technologies introduced by governments or large commercial companies. A recent project I’m involved in studies the rice cultivation practices of Maroon communities in Suriname. A variety of cases are published in the volume I edited (with Sandip Hazareesingh) titled “Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History”(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). I have published in a variety of historical and interdisciplinary journals.
SHOT has been my preferred intellectual home for more than twenty years now. I am particularly pleased to have witnessed an increased interest in technologies that developed in locations other than Western research labs and industrial R&D units. I have been a member of the SHOT International Scholars program committee (currently the Global Community Committee) and organised a variety of SHOT sessions at several annual meetings. I am honoured to be nominated for the Nominating Committee. If elected, I would continue working on supporting SHOT’s efforts in diversity and inclusion and its global geographical outlook. I would also aim to strengthen a divers and  inclusive technology focus, giving equal space for studies on low-cost materials and practices, and studies using sources beyond those written up by the rich and powerful.

Scott Gabriel Knowles

Thank you for this opportunity to stand for election to the Nominating Committee of SHOT, my academic home base since my first meeting in 1998. Cultivating a diverse and interdisciplinary leadership for SHOT is absolutely essential, and I would use my international experience as a researcher and teacher to help guide my work in these areas. SHOT must strive to be the most vibrant, inclusive, and interdisciplinary technology studies community in the world—I will serve with this goal in mind if elected. I was honored (and learned a lot from my peers) by serving on the SHOT Executive Council (2014-2017), and I have also served on the Robinson Prize Committee. I was the winner of the Levinson Prize (way back in) 2003.
Today, I serve as Endowed Chair Professor in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. I study the historical processes that make disasters possible, and the application of history to reduce future disasters. I take a special interest in slow disaster, technology, urbanism, and the inequalities disasters produce, and serve as a co-founder of Disaster Researchers for Justice. I  have authored/edited six books—including The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (2011); Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Perspective (co-edited with Kyle Cleveland and Ryuma Shineha, 2021); and Worlds Fairs in the Era of the Cold War (co-edited with Art Molella, 2019). My work on the history of risk and disaster has appeared in Daedalus, Anthropocene Review, Natural Hazards Observer, Journal of Policy History, American Scientist, Technology and Culture, Engineering Studies, Hankyoreh, New York Times, and the Washington Post among other outlets. I am a Penn Press series co-editor (with Kim Fortun and Jacob Remes) of “Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster” and founding co-editor of the Journal of Disaster Studies (first issue 2024!) In 2020 and 2021, I hosted #COVIDCalls every weekday, a live podcast discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thanks for your consideration!

Editorial Committee (1 position – 2 candidates)

Ross Basset

I am a professor of history at North Carolina State University in the United States where I have taught since 1998.  I also serve as the director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars, a dual degree program for students pursuing degrees in both engineering and humanities or social sciences.  I have been a SHOT member since 1990. I have authored two books, To the Digital Age:  Industrial Research Labs, Start-Up Companies and the Rise of the MOS Transistor (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and The Technological Indian (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press 2016). I received the IEEE Life Member’s History Prize for my article “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States.” Technology and Culture 50, no. 4 (2009): 783–810. I served as the SHOT Treasurer from 2014 to 2016.  I am currently working on a project on French engineers and their learning of and use of the English language in the twentieth century.
I would seek to encourage Technology and Culture to be a venue that welcomes contributors that represent the diversity of SHOT’s membership.  We should seek to work with scholars whose first language is not English.  I would also like to continue and even expand the reviews of books in languages other than English.  We should continue to explore ways to broaden the reach of SHOT and Technology and Culture.

Thomas Zeller

It is an honor to be nominated for membership on Technology and Culture’s Editorial Committee. The journal has provided intellectual sustenance, critical insights, and engaging discussions for me for more than a quarter century. If elected, I would dedicate myself to expanding the intellectual boundaries of publications in T&C while upholding the high professional standards of the field’s flagship journal.
Presently, I am a professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, where I teach the history of technology, environmental history, and STS. My graduate student training in the United States and Germany (where I received my Ph.D.) and my professional experience at four universities in the U.S. have familiarized me with a variety of different academic cultures. Much of my research and publications has been inspired by the efforts of many scholars to meld approaches from the history of technology and from environmental history under the Envirotech banner. In 2022, Johns Hopkins University Press published my book Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters. I have co-edited four volumes on the history of infrastructures and on the environmental history of Germany and am the author of Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970 (2007).
As a member of the Editorial Committee, I would champion the thematic and methodological diversity of T&C. One of the hallmarks of the journal has been its openness to publish papers from scholars who approach the history of technology while being anchored in other disciplines or traditions of thought. This has served the journal well. Its function as the premier forum for debate, scholarly disagreement, and new departures in the field requires broadmindedness and professional work. As I see it, the role of the Editorial Board is to support these efforts.

Vote now!

Please note: Voting is open for SHOT Members only. Therefore, we ask you to fill in your membership number and name. This information is only used to check whether you are allowed to vote. You can find your membership number in the renewal e-mail of JHUP and on the Technology and Culture address label. If you cannot find your membership number, please fill in 0000. The SHOT secretariat will then check your membership status. Please note that votes of non-members will not be taken into account. Of course, you can always contact the SHOT secretariat concerning your membership

SHOT Elections 2023 Online Ballot

Vote online until 25 October 2023 via the ONLINE BALLOT.

SHOT Elections 2023 Paper Ballot

Complete the ballot below and send it to the SHOT Secretary’s office via regular mail before 15 October 2023.

Mail address:
Jan Korsten, SHOT Secretary
Foundation for the History of Technology
TU/e – Atlas building 8.401
PO Box 513
5600 MB EINDHOVEN
The Netherlands

Alternatively, you can e-mail a scan of the completed Paper Ballot until 25 October 2023 to: SHOT.secretariat@tue.nl

 Voting is open for SHOT Members only. Please put your membership number and name below. This information is only used to check whether you are allowed to vote.

 

SHOT Membership No.:               ___________________

Last Name:                                     ____________________________________________

First Name:                                     ____________________________________________

BALLOT

Executive Council Treasurer
Vote for 3 out of 6 candidates Vote for the nominated treasurer
Adewumi Damilola Adebayo Amy Bix
Matthew N. Eisler Nominating Committee
Per Högselius Vote for 1 out of 2 candidates
Diana J. Montaño   Harro Maat
Fabian Prieto-Ñañez Scott Gabriel Knowles
Magdalena Zdrodowska Editorial Committee
Secretary Vote for 1 out of 2 candidates
Vote for the nominated secretary Ross Basset
Jan Korsten Thomas Zeller

Download the SHOT 2023 Election Newsletter in PDF format.

 

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