Molly Berger
2695 Rocklyn Rd., Shaker Heights, OH 44122, USA
molly@rmrc.net 

Nina Lerman - Listserv Editor
Whitman College, Department of History, Walla Walla, WA 99362, USA 
lermanne@whitman.edu 

David Morton - Newsletter Coordinator
IEEE History Center at Rutgers University, 39 Union St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA
d.morton@ieee.org  

Prepared by Nina Lerman

Sometimes history finds the historians and it is clear that the listserv provided a useful space for some of WITH's members to explore the vertigo of intellect and emotion resulting from the events of September 11th. It was a great relief to all to hear from many living in or near the areas most directly affected. Online, WITH members conveyed myriad reactions both personal and professional. Poems and prayers were offered along with petitions and urgent pleas to contribute our voices as scholars to the national discourse. Several WITH members who teach in colleges and universities communicated the challenge of addressing and discussing the numbing issues with their students. To date much of that dialogue has been among WITH members living in the United States. The thoughts and contributions of our international members are most welcome. The decision to reprint this exchange is one which will be taken up at the meeting in San Jose.

The Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology

The Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology program of the National Science Foundation, which provides funding for scholars, has issued an updated program announcement. It's available at http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf01152. Check the SDEST program's home page for other relevant information and links to current awards, at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/ses/sdest/. A revised home page is being prepared.

Societal Dimensions continues to consider a wide variety of proposals for research and education about the interactions of engineering, science, technology, and society. The Ethics and Values Studies (EVS) component supports examinations of the ethical and value dimensions in thoseinteractions. The Research on Knowledge, Science and Technology (RST) component supports research on social and strategic choices that influence knowledge production and innovations and their effects.

In EVS, the new announcement highlights the area of ethics and research in the social and behavioral sciences, including human subjects' issues; in RST, it highlights research on social and cultural issues affecting goal-driven research centers. Another area of interest for the program is studies of inter-governmental efforts in support of research.

Other NSF announcements of potential interest are:

Information Technology Research (ITR): http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2001/nsf01149/nsf01149.htm

"Today IT is essential for our economy, our research, our education, and many other areas of life. Critical national problems in health care, the environment, government operations, teaching and scholarship all require IT knowledge for their solution. This solicitation requests proposals that address fundamental research and education in IT; IT implications for individuals, society, and scholarship; or application areas at the intersection of IT and other science or engineering disciplines." The program area titled "Augmenting Individuals, Transforming Society" contains the following research areas that may be of special interest:

The first ITR deadline is November 9, for pre-proposals concerning large projects (over $5M), and medium-size project proposals ($500K to $5M) are due November 13. The proposals for small (<$500K) projects are due by February 6, 2002. The small proposals will be reviewed by individual programs, and the schedule matches our spring competition rather closely.

The program announcement for Research Experiences for Undergraduates Sites and Supplements can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf01121 Investigators with SDEST awards can apply for REU supplements for support for undergraduate assistance. Additionally, the SDEST program provides small amounts of additional funds to enable ethics activities as part of REU Sites projects in all areas of science and engineering. But besides these kinds of support, the SDEST program encourages investigators to apply to the REU Sites program to undertake summer research activities on their campuses and collaborating campuses with undergraduate students who want to work with them on ethics and science or science policy related research. The deadline for submission to the REU Sites program is September 15, yearly. If you are interested, please contact the REU Sites program director for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, to discuss the program and your ideas. She is Bonney Sheahan, and she can be reached at bsheahan@nsf.gov.

SDEST program director Rachelle Hollander is on sabbatical this academic year. During this period, Joan Sieber is replacing her as program director. Joan can be reached at jsieber@nsf.gov and at the phone and fax and office numbers listed below.

In early 2003 Fitzroy Dearborn will publish the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology, edited by Dr Colin Hempstead. The list of entries and an introduction to the Encyclopedia can be viewed on the project's web site (http://www.fitzroydearborn.com/london/tech/intro.htm. Contact Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology, Fitzroy Dearborn, 310 Regent Street, London W1B 3AX, tel: +44 (0)20 7467 1424 fax: +44 (0)20 7636 6982, tech@fitzroydearborn.co.uk, http://www.fitzroydearborn.com/london/tech/intro.htm

Note: The deadline for submission of proposals for this conference is 1 November 2001. The Liberal Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education seeks proposals for complete sessions as well as individual papers. The division encourages papers that examine the intellectual and practical dimensions of bringing liberal education into full membership in the community of engineering educators. Papers are especially welcome on: assessment of liberal education, gender and technology, engineering ethics, nature of design and engineering practice, and philosophy of engineering knowledge. Questions may be directed to: W. Bernard Carlson, Division of Technology, Culture, and Communication, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, 351 McCormick Road, P.O. Box 400744, Thornton Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4744; (804) 924-6113; fax (804) 924-4306; e-mail: wc4p@virginia.edu.

Transforming Spaces: The Topological Turn In Technology Studies is an international conference to be held in Darmstadt, Germany, March 22-24, 2002.

Note: The deadline for submission of paper proposals is 1 November 2001. This conference will problematize the spatial character of the relationship between technology and human beings. It addresses two interrelated questions: To what extent do machines and media organize society three-dimensionally - thus ordering the spaces in which modern life takes place? And, conversely, to what extent do material and communicative structures open up new mental and physical spaces - thus transforming the boundaries of daily life? To denote our explicit concern with spatiality we propose the mathematical term "topology."

The days are gone, when "technology" meant only the material means used by rational human seeking goals in accordance with principles of maximum efficiency and economic return. Today, scholars in the interdisciplinary field of "technology studies" emphasize the symbolic and discursive character of our artifact-saturated universe, as well as the machine's subtle perpetuation of social inequalities and political conditions. These scholars have begun to discuss technology as a medium, as a human-created "ambience" that infiltrates interpersonal relations and permeates society. Focusing on the spatial dimension of materials and media, this conference intends to shape developments in the field.

Technology has become a kind of second nature in modern life. For instance, cell telephones, computers, and the internet enable us to become more independent of physical location. The death of distance has been declared. Simultaneously, however, they have influenced mobility and cognitive patterns, as well as re-drawn the boundaries between the private and public spheres. By bringing out the spatial character of modern technology, the conference takes seriously its "topological" nature - both on a physical and discursive level. And, by focusing on urban structures, simulation techniques, and visualizing media in daily life, it intends to investigate the spatial character of technology in various settings and from various theoretical points of view.

Technologies, we argue, are far more than passive physical presences. They mediate between human

beings, they bridge physical distance, and they contribute to the transformation of individual identities. They allow people to interact at new places, they open up new mental spaces, and they help us to visualize new arenas for action. The spatial character of the human-made world is not limited to computers and other information technologies. Machines and media also impose on the world a certain multi-dimensional "order of things." In urban settings especially, buildings, streets, and lighting systems make up a set of material "dispositives" that strongly define what "degrees of freedom" citizens may enjoy.

The conference will be divided into four sections, each consisting of one 45-minute plenary speech and two parallel paper sessions, each of which will include four presentations. There will be 20 minutes scheduled for the oral presentation of each paper, followed by 15 minutes discussion. To guarantee insightful introductions to the various topics, four internationally outstanding plenary speakers have already accepted the invitation; cf. program below.

One-page abstracts for papers, accompanied by a one-page CV, may be sent to Professor Mikael Hård, Department of History, Technical University Darmstadt, Schloss, DE-64283 Darmstadt, Germany, hard@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de, before Nov. 1, 2001.

Janet Abbate writes from an unnamed Internet cafe in London that she was awarded a two-year NSF grant to do research for a book on the history of women in computing since WWII. She is currently conducting oral history interviews of British and American women computer scientists and programmers; transcripts of these interviews will eventually be archived and made available over the web to scholars and the general public.

Molly Berger started a new job in late May 2001 at Case Western Reserve University as Assistant Dean for Summer Programs. She is working for the College of Arts and Sciences, the Case School of Engineering, and the Weatherhead School of Management in a position developed to strengthen summer academic programming and enliven campus life. She reports that the work is very interesting and she is learning all kinds of things about administration, marketing, and negotiating competing interests. The job comes with an appointment as instructor in the Department of History where she continues to teach the history of technology and American history. She also teaches a humanities course for the Department of Information Systems' MBA program. This year she is teaching an undergraduate course called "Culture and Computers," which she says is quite a trick for a 19th century historian. The class meets half the time in a virtual classroom and she has offered to let us know how it turns out when they are done in December. She says that one of the advantages to teaching in a virtual setting is that she has been able to move her classroom to a beach location, complete with chirping birds and gentle ocean breezes. She continues to work on her book on luxury hotels.

Lindy Biggs is the delighted recipient of a NSF grant to work on her project tentatively titled "The Factory and The Child Labor Question: A Study in Technology and Change." She wires, "when it rains, it pours." She has also accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to Norway for spring semester 2002. She'll be at NTNU in Trondheim

Amy Bix has recently published two articles on the history of women's engineering education in America: "Feminism Where Men Predominate: The History of Women's Science and Engineering Education at MIT," in the Women's Studies Quarterly special issue on women and science (Spring/Summer, 2000) and the second, "Engineeresses Invade Campus: Four Decades of Debate over Technical Coeducation," in the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (spring, 2000). She has also recently published an introductory survey piece, "History of Women in Science, Technology, and Medicine," in Transforming the Disciplines: A Women's Studies Primer, (Haworth Press, 2001).

Carolyn Cooper reports that she is mostly just doing the same things she was doing this time last year, including editing a two-volume book on Connecticut towns in the period 1800-1832 for the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, to be published next year. She has also written book reviews recently for T&C, Business History Review, and the Journal of Economic History.

Gail Cooper gave a paper at the St. Louis conference on women quality control inspectors in a session with Amy Bix and Jennifer Light. The session was titled "Women on the Edge: The Shifting Boundaries of Women's Scientific and Technical Work during World War II." Amy's paper was on the ESMWT programs that trained women engineers during the war, and Jennifer's paper was on women calculators in early development of computers during the war. Ruth Cowan chaired and Debbie Douglas commented. Gail's paper is part of a larger history of quality control in the US and Japan. She notes that this conference seemed to be the perfect forum for exploring the gendered aspect of an emerging profession and for presenting her work on African-American women inspectors who worked in an all-black production line at the St. Louis Ordnance plant.

Jonathan Coopersmith is on leave this year trying to turn the fax machine research into a finished manuscript by June. He is still answering the occasional media query on pornography and communications technologies, and is working with William Hausman, Mira Wilkens and others on a global electrification project. He says that he recently flew to Bangkok to help his mother recuperate from emergency cataract surgery this June. WITHies and others, get your eyes checked.

Ginny Dawson received a NASA contract to work on a history of the Plum Brook Nuclear Reactor Facility near Cleveland, Ohio.

Deborah Douglas opened "Mind and Hand: The Making of MIT Scientists and Engineers," a major new exhibition at the MIT Museum. She has been working with Amy Foster, Alan Meyer and Lucy Young to prepare a revised edition of her book on American women in aviation published by the University Press of Kentucky. She continues work on her manuscripts on the history of airports (for the Johns Hopkins University press) and the federal role in the development of aeronautical engineering (for NASA).

Karen Freeze is preparing a new course, "Technology and Society in Eastern Europe." In late June she gave a case writing workshop at the Textile College of the University of Manchester in the UK, and in late July she gave a paper at the IEEE's conference on the history of telecommunications, entitled "Peter Goldmark: Technological Visionary" in St. John's Newfoundland. In the spring she completed a case study on a marvelous ceramic water filter technology that was plagued by unfocused management. More recently she has finished-- she adds "sort of"-- an article/case study on a Swedish tool company's ergonomic product development process.

Jane Farrell-Beck has a forthcoming book (November 2001) from the University of Pennsylvania entitled Uplift: The Bra In America. The Penn Press web site has a writeup on this history of the bra in the US. Technology threads through the chapters, including use of new fibers and other components. Well over 1200 patents for breast supporters were received between 1863 and 1969, almost half of them going to women.

Gerard Fitzgerald received the 2001-02 Edelstein International Studentship [postdoc] at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. His nearly finished dissertation is a study of airborne disease, public health, biomedical research, and biological weapons. This past year he presented papers at SHOT in Munich, HSS in Vancouver, and the CDC in Atlanta. His most important news is that he will be marrying fellow WITHie Gabriella Petrick next summer.

Delphine Gardey is a researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS/Cite des Sciences, Paris, France, a professor at the Institut National des télécommunication, Evry. She has recently published a gendered history of a clerks as a social group, called L'expéditionnaire et la dactylographe, Histoire des employés de bureau 1890-1930 (Editions Belin, 2000). She has a forthcoming book on gender and technology, L'engendrement des Choses. Des hommes, des Femmes et des Techniques, to be published by Editions des Archives Contemporaines in 2002.

Carolyn Goldstein spent the summer on leave from her park service job to work on her book.

Daryl Hafter's latest publication is an article in Enterprise & Society (March 2001), entitled "Women in the Underground Business of Eighteenth-Century Lyon." In June she participated in two colloquia in Paris, both at the Centre La Villette, This semester she is on leave to complete a manuscript on Women's work in 18th century Rouen's guilds and Lyon's silk industry.

Gabrielle Hecht had last year off thanks to a grant from the ACLS and spent it researching the history of uranium mining, reading archival material collected in Gabon and Madagascar, and collecting some new in England, France, and Australia. In late August she became associate chair of her history department and is teaching a course called "Race, Gender, and Empire in the Nuclear Age," and is building an STS program at the University of Michigan.

Susan Schmidt Horning is a PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University. Her dissertation is a technological and cultural history of recording studios in America. Articles based on her research have appeared in Hans-Joachim Braun's edited volume 'I Sing the Body Electric': Music and Technology in the 20th Century, (Wolke Verlag, 2000) and in ICON in (2000). She is a member of the ICOHTEC jazz group.

Judith White Hughes is an independent researcher with primary interest in the history of tools and techniques in the fiber arts and needlecrafts - from hand plying to Velcro. She claims that she is "probably older, spunkier and oft-times starchier than the average WITHie" and says she "wishes the organization had been around when she was teaching and learning."

Grace Lees-Maffei has recently published 'From Service to Self-Service: Etiquette Writing as Design Discourse, 1920 to 1970', forthcoming in the Journal of Design History (Autumn 2001) and 'Italianicity and Internationalism: the design, production and marketing of Alessi s.p.a.', will be published in Modern Italy (May 2002).

Miriam Levin was invited Professor at the University Blaise Pascal in France for the spring semester, and will be presenting lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales at the University of Paris and at the Technical University in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Last April she organized a symposium on Museums in a Developing World at the Mandel Center, UCITE, the Baker Nord Center, and the History Department at CWRU. She presented a paper on "The City as a Museum of Technology Revisited" and participated in a symposium on "The History of Engineering Education" at the XXI International Congress for the History of Science in Mexico City in July 2001.

Pamela Mack has had a paper published on the impact of feminism on engineering in a new book called Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine (University of Chicago Press). She has recently received a contract to write a history of Forest Service management of the land at the Savannah River Site nuclear fuel production facility. She is also developing a related interdisciplinary course; a draft syllabus is on the web at: http://people.clemson.edu/~pammack/sylforest.html . She says she has been using the Internet heavily in her teaching, and has written some reflections in "The Authority of Experience: Assessing the Use of Information Technology in the Classroom," in The Journal of Electronic Publishing for September 2000.

Alen D. Meyer is a 4th year Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware working with Arwen Mohun. He successfully completed his comps last spring, and is now writing the prospectus for his dissertation, tentatively titled "Why Fly? A Social and Cultural History of General Aviation in Post-WWII America." He helped organize and host the 2001 Hagley Fellows Conference "Consumption and the Environment" in March 2001. He received the Stanley J. and Marion Goldfus Memorial Award for Best University of Delaware History Department Teaching Assistant for 2001.

Arwen Mohun has been chipping away at her book project on technology and risk. Last fall, she gave papers at the 4S meeting, and the HSS Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. An article on gender, risk, and amusement parks is slated to appear in the Journal of Design History in November. She spent two weeks in Brazil this August talking about gender and technology, and her current research project with faculty and grad students at two Brazilian Universities in Sao Paulo and Curitiba. In October 2000, she helped organize the conference "Writing the Past, Claiming the Future: Women and Gender in Science, Technology, and Medicine" in St. Louis.

David Morton has worked for the last year on a new project for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers called the IEEE Virtual Museum. This educational web site for pre-college students is intended to increase technical literacy and promote the history of technology. The first two exhibits, a general exhibit on the history of electricity and an exhibit on sound recording, will open in early 2002. A third exhibit on electrical technology and women will open in mid-2002.

Ruth Oldenziel has moved to the Institute of Social Research, at the University of Amsterdam and has been co-chair of the ESF "Tensions of Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe" with Johan Schot. The book Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s-1990s, she edited with Karin Zachmann and Annie Canel will be available through Routledge. Together with research group of graduate students and postdocs, she finished a volume on household technology (November 2001) in a multi-volume series on Twentieth-Century Dutch History of Technology. Her article "Boys and Their Toys" has reprinted in a volume with the same title edited by Roger Horowitz published by Routledge this month.

Gabriella M. Petrick is a second year Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware, studying the industrialization of taste in the twentieth century. She has recently received a Stewart Internship from the University of Delaware, a J. Walter Thompson Research Grant from Duke University, and a travel grant from the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

Sara Pritchard received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in June 2001. She is currently postdoctoral associate in History and STS at MIT where she is writing several articles, thinking about writing a book (tentatively entitled, The Nature of the State: Nation, Technology, and the Remaking of the Rhone River in Contemporary France), and enjoying Cambridge and Boston.

Francie Robb says that she is proud of her Independent Scholar status and also continues to teach history of technology courses as an adjunct at Waynesburg College.

Marjorie Senechal is on sabbatical this year, working on a book on science, technology and silk, which is still untitled.

Amy Slaton got an NSF grant for a project on "Minority Engineering Education in the United States since 1945." It will be based on oral history interviews and archival research. She has also received a grant from Drexel University to convert a history of technology survey course for engineering students into a web-based course. She calls on WITHies to send her any information they may be willing to share on gender and technology web sites that are suitable for use in the classroom, along with the details of how they can be used.

Autumn Stanley and Kathleen Ochs gave papers on women inventors in prehistory and later at the St. Louis conference on Women and Gender in Science, Medicine, and Technology in October 2000. She is currently writing the profile of Katharine Burr Blodgett for the new volume of Notable American Women, and is working on a book on Charlotte Smith (tentatively titled More Hell And Fewer Dahlias: The Public Life Of Charlotte Smith, 1840-1917), which should be done by the end of this year. Her other projects include a book on British women inventors and a biographical dictionary of 19th-century US women patentees and inventors. For these latter two she is seeking contributors, collaborators, and funding.

Bayla Singer is finishing the book Sex With God: a Cultural History of Flying for Roger Launius's series related to the Wright Bros centennial in 2003. The volumes of the series are intended for general audiences, and she says she is having a real blast writing hers, "putting in everything AND the kitchen sink -- anthropology, mythology, psychiatry, religion, literature, folklore, you name it."

John Staudenmair has begun his tenure as Acting Dean: College of Liberal Arts, University of Detroit Mercy