Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
I am a historian of modern technology, with specialization in technology and religion; industrial culture; and engineering, ethics, and society. I hold an M.A. in modern German history, and a PhD in history of technology, emphasizing modern Europe, from the University of Washington (Seattle). Before coming to Minnesota I held a research fellowship at CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Paris. My early articles and first book, The Mantra of Efficiency, focused on foundational concepts of industry and industrial culture; the translation of technological values into social values; the mathematics of machine performance; and the developing cultural power of a particular technological value: efficiency. Mantra of Efficiency was awarded the Edelstein Prize by the Society for the History of Technology, as outstanding book published in the preceding three years. My current research focuses on technology and religion. I am at work on a book manuscript analyzing the international religious critique of technology that developed following WWII. Methodologically, I ask how religious and theological interpretations of technology have changed over time; how, over time, technologies and engineering have extended their reach into the human world over time through a developing technological orthodoxy; and how these changes have affected each other. In particular, my research seeks to understand the widespread mobilizing of religious critique of technology in the post-war world. I teach courses in history of technology, engineering ethics, theories of technological change, and religion and technology.
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
Specialties
Modern industrial/technological culture; science, technology, and religion; history of engineering; technology and the body; historiography; modern Europe, modern U
Lab
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (HSTM) - 585 Shepherd Lab
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
2010 Sidney M. Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology.
The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Order through Johns Hopkins University Press
Articles
Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.
“Military Medicine in East Asia: Histories of Instrumentalism, Resistance, and Agency,” in War and Medicine in Twentieth-Century China and Japan, special issue of East Asian Science, Technology, and Society, ed. Michael Liu Shiyung, forthcoming.
“From SARS to COVID-19: Rethinking Global Health Lessons from Taiwan,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 14, no. 4 (2020): 647–655.
“Taiwan as Study Abroad,” American Journal for Chinese Studies, 27, no. 1 (April 2020): 66–68.
“Blood, Soy Milk, and Vitality: The Wartime Origins of Blood Banking in China, 1943–45,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90 no. 3 (2016): 424-454. (Article was awarded the Zhu Kezhen Junior Scholar Prize by ISHEASTM in 2019)
“Rationalization comes to Rome: Fascism and the Third International Congress on the Scientific Management of Labor, Rome, 1927” in Evert Peeters, ed., Between Autonomy and Engagement: Performances of Scientific Expertise, 1860-1960 (London: Pickering & Chatto, Series History and Philosophy of Technoscience, 2015): 147-160.
“Science, Medicine, and Confucianism in the Making of China and Southeast Asia – Lim Boon Keng and the Overseas Chinese, 1897 to 1937,” Twentieth-Century China 39, no. 1 (2014): 24-43.
“Radically religious: Ecumenical Roots of the Critique of Technological Society,” in Helena Jerónimo, José Luís Garcia, Carl Mitcham, eds., Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the Twenty-First Century (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer Verlag, 2013): 191-203.
“Thinking again about science in technology,” Isis 103 (2012): 518-26.
“The power to give credit and blame,” History and Technology 28 (2012): 83-92.
“The Concept of Efficiency: An Historical Analysis,” in Anthony Meijers, ed., Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, v. 8: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (Elsevier, 2009): 1007-1030.
"Efficiencies of Balance: Technical Efficiency, Popular Efficiency, and Arbitrary Standards in the Late Progressive Era USA." Social Studies of Science 38 no. 3 (2008): 323-349.
"An Efficiency of Scarcity: Using Food to Increase the Productivity of Soviet Prisoners of War in the Mines of the Third Reich." History and Technology 22 no. 4 (2006): 391-406.
"Efficiency and Pathology: Mechanical Discipline and Efficient Worker Seating in Germany, 1929–1932." Technology and Culture 47 no. 2 (2006): 286-310.