Edward Jones-Imhotep

I am a historian of the social and cultural life of machines. I write about topics ranging from the history of androids and music studios to space science and the technological geographies of islands. My research generally engages two broad themes: the changing historical boundaries between technology and nature; and the historical relations between machines and the self. I’m particularly interested in underrepresented histories of technology: histories of the Black technological self and the technological underground; and histories of technological failure — breakdowns, malfunctions, accidents — and what they reveal about the place of machines and the stakes of machine failures in the culture, politics, and economics of modern societies.

My first book, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017), won the Sidney Edelstein Prize for the best scholarly book in the field of history of technology. My current book project, Reliable Humans, Trustworthy Machines: Histories of the Technological Self, examines how people from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries understood machine failures as a problem of the self — a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, or threatened, or presupposed. My new research project, The Black Androids, explores black technological experience in 19th and early 20th century America through a history of the "black androids" — automata in the form of black humans.

I received my PhD in history of science and technology from Harvard University. I am currently Director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) and co-editor (with Rebecca Slayton and Wiebe Bijker) of MIT Press’s Inside Technology series. I hold an ongoing visiting professorship at the University of Paris (Panthéon-Assas) and am a co-founder of Toronto’s TechnoScience Salon, a public forum for humanities-based discussions about science and technology.

Sidney Edlestein Prize

The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press)

Winner of the Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. The Edelstein Prize is awarded to “an outstanding scholarly book published in the history of technology during the preceding three years.”

Abbot Payson Usher Prize

“Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self”

Winner of the Abbot Payson Usher Prize. The Usher Prize is awarded annually to “the author of the best scholarly work published during the preceding three years under the auspices of the Society for the History of Technology.”

The Ghost Factories — Histories of Automation

My recent piece — "The Ghost Factories" — explores why we need a very different history of automation, and what it might mean for our current entanglements with technology. You can read it here, in the recent issue of History and Technology.