Honghong Tinn is a historian of information technology and received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. Before joining the University of Minnesota, she held fellowships and academic positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany, the National University of Singapore, and Earlham College. Her research interests are in the areas of the history of digital electronic computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. Her recently published book, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press), explores the transnational exchanges of computing technology and expertise between Taiwan and the United States. She especially emphasizes the agency exercised by local Taiwanese engineers, scientists, technocrats, and computer users in bringing computing technology to and popularizing such technology in Taiwan. She was on the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (2017-2019), chaired the Society's Internationalization Committee (2013-2014) and the International Small Grants Committee (2017-2019), and is an elected member of the nominating committee (2023-2025). She is currently an advisory editor for Engineering Studies and on the editorial board of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (Duke University Press).  

Teaching Subjects

• HSCI 3401/5401 Ethics in Science and Technology (Fall 2023)
• CSCI 4921/HSCI 4321 History of Computing (Fall 2023)
• HSCI 1011: Digital World (Spring 2024)

Selected Publications

“Between ‘Magnificent Machine’ and ‘Elusive Device’: Wassily Leontief’s Interindustry Input-output Analysis and its International Applicability,” Osiris 38 (2023).

“Chapter 13 Globalization,” Computer: A History of the Information Machine. Routledge, 4th edition, 2023, 301-318.

Review of Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2018), Technology and Culture, Forthcoming.

“Making Community Legible, 2012-2018” East Asian Science, Technology, Society 13, no. 1 (2019): 5-6.

“Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Taiwan, 1959-1968,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 4 (October, supplement issue, 2018): 66-99.

“Charting the Cartography of a Global Community of EASTS Scholars,” East Asian Science, Technology, Society 10, no. 4 (2016): 341-342.

“From DIY Computers to Illegal Copies: The Controversy Over Tinkering with Microcomputers in Taiwan, 1980-1984,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 2 (2011): 75-88.

“Cold War Politics: Taiwanese Computing in the 1950s and 1960s,” Think Piece column, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 1 (2010): 92-95.