Edward Jones-Imhotep is an award-winning historian of science and technology. He received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University and is Director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST). He is co-editor (with Rebecca Slayton and Wiebe Bijker) of MIT Press’s Inside Technology series and a co-founder of Toronto’s TechnoScience Salon, a public forum for humanities-based discussions about science and technology. From 2016-2017, he was the Northrop Frye Fellow at the University of Toronto and is currently a Senior Fellow of Massey College. He has held visiting positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and currently holds an ongoing visiting professorship at the University of Paris (Panthéon-Assas). His research has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the European Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).

Jones-Imhotep’s research focuses on the historical intersections of science, technology, and modern culture. He is particularly interested in the historical “behaviors” of technologies — including malfunctions, breakdowns, and failures — and in the place of those behaviors in the culture, politics, and economics of modern societies. His first book, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press), won the 2018 Sidney Edelstein Prize for best scholarly work in the history of technology. In 2017, he received the Abbott Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology for his article, “Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self.” He is currently engaged in two major research projects. A current book project — Unreliable Humans/Fallible Machines — investigates how people from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries saw machine failures as a problem of the self: a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, or threatened, or presupposed. A new long-term research project — The Black Androids and the Technological Underground — explores black technological experience in New York from 1830 to 1930 through the history of the black androids, automata in the form of black humans.