Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Associate Professor, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Director of Graduate Studies, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Associate Professor, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Director of Graduate Studies, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Specialties
Jennifer Karns Alexander is a historian of modern technology and modern technological culture, with specialization in mechanical technologies and their digital parallels, technology and religion, and engineering, ethics, and society. Underlying her research is the question of technological orthodoxy, asking how technologies have gained high status as cultural and economic goods. Her early publications and first book, The Mantra of Efficiency, revealed how efficiency transitioned from an obscure measurement of the performance of machines (like steam engines and waterwheels) into a nearly universal value used to measure just about everything. Mantra was awarded the Sidney Edelstein Prize. She is completing a book manuscript comparing conservative and liberal Christian critiques of technology since World War II, examining how developing technological values help reveal persisting and new religious values. Two supplementary lines of research examine the role of technology in identifying machinic personalities such as psychopathy, schizophrenia, and autism in the mid-twentieth century; and changes in the relative cultural status of technology and science from the industrial revolution to the present.
Jennifer Karns Alexander is a historian of modern technology and modern technological culture, with specialization in mechanical technologies and their digital parallels, technology and religion, and engineering, ethics, and society. She completed the PhD in history and history of science and technology at the University of Washington. Before joining the Minnesota faculty she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, and a visiting professor of history at the University of Washington. She is vice president and in-coming president-elect (January 2027) of the international Society for the History of Technology. Underlying her research is the question of technological orthodoxy, asking how technologies have gained high status as cultural and economic goods. Her early publications and first book, The Mantra of Efficiency, revealed how efficiency transitioned from an obscure measurement of the performance of machines (like steam engines and waterwheels) into a nearly universal value used to measure just about everything. Mantra was awarded the Sidney Edelstein Prize. She is completing a book manuscript comparing conservative and liberal Christian critiques of technology since World War II, examining how developing technological values help reveal persisting and new religious values. Two supplementary lines of research examine the role of technology in identifying machinic personalities such as psychopathy, schizophrenia, and autism in the mid-twentieth century; and changes in the relative cultural status of technology and science from the industrial revolution to the present.
Ph.D. 1996, Department of History, University of Washington
M.A. 1990, Department of History, University of Wyoming
B.S. 1987, Department of History, University of Wyoming
Director of Graduate Studies, Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of Minnesota, 2017-present
Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Mechanical Engineering, 2007 - present
Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, Mechanical Engineering, 1999-2007
Sidney M. Edelstein Prize, Mantra of Efficiency, 2010.
Vice president and president-elect, Society for the History of Technology, 2024-2028.
The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
*Awarded the Sidney M. Edelstein Prize by the Society for the History of Technology for outstanding book published in the history of technology in the previous three years.
*“Introduction: the varieties of efficiency” translated and reprinted in Anthony Huberman et al, eds. Other Mechanisms (Vienna, Austria: Secessions Gallery, 2018), 64-80.