The Society for the History of Technology is dedicated to the historical study of technology and its relations with politics, economics, labor, business, the environment, public policy, science, and the arts. Founded in 1958, the society now numbers around 1500 members. An international society, SHOT meets annually in North America or Europe and also sponsors smaller conferences focused on specialized topics, often jointly with other scholarly societies and organizations.
The society’s quarterly journal, Technology and Culture, is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. In addition to T&C, SHOT publishes regular newsletters, and, with the Johns Hopkins University Press, a new book series “Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society, and Culture.”
SHOT is an international organization that actively works to foster a stronger global community for the study of the history of technology and to support a worldwide network of scholars in this field. We welcome as members people from any country who are interested in the history of technology, broadly defined. SHOT currently has members from at least thirty-five countries, including Australia, Greece, Italy, South Korea, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and India. Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Japan, and France all have significant representation in SHOT.
SHOT has a number of programs to support members from outside North America, including our International Scholars program (Internationalization) and our program of travel grants to SHOT meetings. At least once every four years SHOT holds its annual meeting outside North America. Previous locations have included London, Munich, Uppsala, Amsterdam, and Lisbon.
In 2016, SHOT held its annual meeting in Singapore, marking its first-ever conference in Asia.
2020 marked SHOT’s successful, first ever, Virtual Meeting making it possible for members and non members to meet during this difficult year, influenced by COVID-19, social distancing and travel bans.
Our 2021 Virtual meeting, joint with HSS, proved to be an invigorating meeting with over a thousand participants from all over the world. We want to thank our members, and a special thank you to our sponsors, for making this happen. The first ‘Post-COVID” Annual Meeting in New Orleans included the first hybrid options, with 2 sponsored virtual strings of in total 16 sessions being streamed, was very well attended. On top of these successful meetings, we are now looking forward to, we hope, again an In Person meeting in 2023, in Long Beach!