Hello! I am a professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara where I research, write, and teach about the histories of technology and science.

My latest book – titled Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture – came out with The MIT Press in late 2020. This book looks at the collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists from the 1950s to the present and explores how new creative cultures were built and maintained.

I am currently working on a new book (also for MIT Press). Tentatively titled READ ME, I am imagining it as a “book about books about computing.” In other words, I want to take a selection of about a dozen books (some famous, others not) about computers and computing and use them to tell a larger story about the history of information technologies since 1945. At its heart is the question: how did computers become popular, popularized, and pervasive?

I was originally trained as a scientist (Ph.D., 1996, University of Arizona). As an undergraduate, I studied an interdisciplinary field known as “materials science and engineering” (it used to be called metallurgy). I figured I would learn lots of basic math, physics, and chemistry and get a foundation for other areas of science and technology. Although my career path followed a different trajectory, my schooling gave me some insights into how research communities function which has proven useful when interviewing scientists and technologists. Since then, I have authored and edited six books. My 2013 book The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future won the Watson Davis Prize in 2014 from the History of Science Society as the “best book written for a general audience.”

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have many opportunities offered to me. In addition to several grants from the National Science Foundation – including $15 million to co-found a national center for exploring the societal implications of new technologies – I have been awarded fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the American Council of Learned Societies, the California Institute of Technology, and (twice) the Smithsonian Institution. In 2016 and 2017, the World Economic Forum invited me to speak at their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. I am also an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Physical Society (APS). A full c.v. is here.

On a personal note: I grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. When I saw movies like Poltergeist or ET, they seemed odd as West Coast suburban living looked really different from my own experiences. I find this ironic as I live a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean in a tract-style house built c. Sputnik. I didn’t fly in an airplane until I was 19. But I visited the National Air and Space Museum when I was a kid and loved it (there is a tattoo of Sputnik’s launch on my right arm and the splashdown of Apollo 17 on my left.) Hiking, surfing, mountain biking, and waving a stick at trout in local streams all get me out of the house and away from screens.

Photo credit: Mark Hanauer