Faculty Research Fellow
Edward Jones-Imhotep (Ph.D. History of Science, Harvard University, 2001) is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST). As a cultural historian of technology, his research engages two broad themes: the changing historical boundaries between technology and nature; and the historical relations between machines and the self. His book, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (2017) won the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology. His forthcoming book, Reliable Humans/Trustworthy Machines, investigates how people from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries saw machine failures as a problem of the self.
Fellowship Research Project—The Black Androids: History and the Technological Underworld
This project explores the black technological experience in 19th- and early 20th-century America through a history of the “black androids” – automata in the form of black humans. The project examines how the technologies that drove the androids racist depictions – steam, clockwork, electricity – also figured crucially in black technological experiences, agency, and selfhood in 19th- and early 20th-century New York. Focusing on the period from 1830 to 1930, it aims to produce the first history of android technologies as both race-making objects and central elements in the technological experiences of African Americans.