How does what you do in the classroom reflect the impact that your field has on the world?

Studying the history of technology reminds us that technological change has always brought both opportunities and dangers. In response, people have also always made decisions about which technologies to adopt and which to regulate. In my courses, students learn how people have been transformed by the built world and how their beliefs have shaped the things they build, a history that can help us make informed technological choices about the world we live in today.

What are your current research interests?

I am a historian of science and technology with a special focus on how people in the past have tried to understand and control the human body—and what the effects of those efforts were. I’m currently finishing a book that traces a technology for recording human movement from its origins in Weimar Germany to its life in present-day computer science and robotics. I’ve also written a technological history of the ballet pointe shoe and have ongoing interests in the history of data and information, technology and religion, and work and labor.

What one piece of advice would you give your students?

In the second half of my course, 88-312, students will learn to represent dynamic systems into stock-and-flow diagrams and to implement such models using a computational simulation tool that will allow the students to generate simulations of those dynamic systems and brainstorm about the effects of variable interactions. During COVID lock down, I took the opportunity to present a dynamic model of the causes and effects of variables influencing the accumulation of COVID cases. Students were able to understand theoretical concepts more rapidly and connect those concepts to naturalistic situations they were experiencing at the moment.