Professor Honghong Tinn awarded McKnight Land-Grant Professorship

Professor Honghong Tinn is a recipient of the 2025 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship for her research  and scholarship on the history of science and technology. The McKnight Land-Grant Professorship Program supports and advances the careers of assistant professors at a crucial point in their professional lives. Recipients hold the designation of “McKnight Land-Grant Professor” for two years.

Tinn is a historian of information technology in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research interests are mainly in the areas of history of electronic digital computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. Her book Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry published earlier this year is the most recent outcome of her research expertise. (Read ECE’s interview with Professor Tinn on Island Tinkerers.)

The book explores the transnational exchanges of computing technology and expertise between Taiwan and the United States. Tinn challenges the myth that the West innovates and the East imitates and emphasizes the agency exercised by local Taiwanese engineers, scientists, technocrats, and computer users in bringing computing technology to and popularizing such technology in Taiwan. It is a narrative of Taiwan’s rise to global prominence in high tech manufacturing led by technology-savvy professionals, technocrats, technology users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. 

Tinn’s research has appeared in Technology and Culture, Osiris, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal. Island Tinkerers was reviewed by the IEEE History Center’s Newsletter and the Taipei Times (paper edition)

Tinn 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. Currently she is working on a research project on the algorithms of social media images inspired by Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, originally published in 2003. She is also working on a paper about the United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), the second largest semiconductor foundry in the 2000s, and the third or fourth largest foundry in recent years.

The McKnight Land-Grant Professorship program aims to strengthen the University’s faculty for the future. The program is designed to advance the careers of outstanding junior faculty members who have been identified as having the potential to make significant contributions to their departments and to their scholarly fields.