teaching

UNDERGRADUATE
Disasters and History
How to Think About Technology
Technological Failure

GRADUATE

Technological Undergrounds: New Methods in History of Technology
Undergrounds have figured powerfully in human histories and imaginations as places of alterity, concealment, exploration, and discovery; as well as spaces of hope, refuge, and fugitivity. This course leads students through a collection of technological undergrounds – real and figurative – to examine the unexplored and underexplored histories of technology. What people and technologies have historically occupied these spaces? How can the idea of the underground help us approach people and technologies traditionally written out of our histories? What can it reveal about agency, resistance, and the category of technology itself? Drawing on recent work in global history, critical race studies, postcolonialism, and digital humanities, the course analyzes the particular challenges posed by source materials and current frameworks, and encourages students to develop new ways of thinking and writing the histories of technology.

Modern Cultural History
This graduate seminar course deals with themes in cultural history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Weekly readings deal with works on industrialism, imperialism, modernism, primitivism, antimodernism, degeneration, historical memory, social reform, social and behavioural science, the quantitative revolution, race, gender and sexuality, consumerism and advertising, cinema, popular culture, and postmodernism.

Trusting Machines
This course explores the history of our trust in machines — its sources, forms, and meanings — over the last three centuries. It uses those investigations to guide students through the conceptual challenges involved in thinking about, and writing about, the historical entanglements between people and machines.

CURRENT GRADUATE SUPERVISION

PhD Students
Katerina Bong (University of Toronto, committee member)
Nayani Jensen (University of Toronto, supervisor)
Dave Hazan (York University, committee member)
Ata Heshmati (University of Toronto, supervisor)
Bree Lohmann (University of Toronto, committee member)
Alexander Offord (University of Toronto, supervisor)

COMPLETED SUPERVISIONS

Committee Member, Jeni Barton (University of Toronto), “Engineering the Earth: A History of the Earth System Concept in the Earth and Environmental Sciences, 1972-1999,” (PhD, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology) June 2020.

Committee Member, Nathan Harron (York University), “Accounting for the Epistemic Benefits of Diversity: Social Location, Identity, and the Politics of Knowledge,” (PhD, Philosophy) May, 2020.

Committee Member, Matthew Hayes (Trent University), “A History of Canada’s UFO Investigation, 1950-1995,” (PhD, Canadian Studies) May, 2019.

Opponent, Johan Gärdebo (KTH Royal Institute of Technology - Stockholm), “Environing Technology: Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment 1969–2001,” (PhD, History of Science, Technology, and Environment) April 2019.

Committee Member, Blair Stein (University of Oklahoma), “All That is Solid Melts Into Air Travel: Environments, Technologies, and the Modern Nation at Trans-Canada Air Lines,” (PhD, History of Science) March 2019.

Supervisor, Yana Boeva, “Break, Make, Retake: Interrogating the Social and Historical Dimensions of Making as a Design Practice,” (PhD, Science and Technology Studies) August 2018.

Supervisor, Jordan Bimm, “Anticipating the Astronaut: Subject Formation in Early American Space Medicine, 1949-1959,” (PhD, Science and Technology Studies) August 2018.

Supervisor, Bretton Fosbrook, “How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies: Alternative Futures and Uncertainty in Strategic Management,” (PhD, Science and Technology Studies) December 2017.

Committee Member, Thomas Cooke, “What’s That Noise? Or, a Case Against Digital Privacy as a Matter of Regulation and Control,” (PhD, Communication and Culture) July 2017.

Committee Member, Duygu Kasdogan, “Potentiating Algae, Modernizing Bioeconomies: Algal Biofuels, Bioenergy Economies, and Built Ecologies in the United States and Turkey,” (PhD, Science and Technology Studies) April 2017.

Supervisor, Michael Laurentius, “A postmodern nation?: Reframing the Classical Modernist Narrative Through Canadian Cold War Technological Projects,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) September 2016.

Supervisor, Alasdair McMillan, “Mediated Cognition: Information Technologies and the Sciences of Mind,” (PhD, Science and Technology Studies) August 2016.

Supervisor, Amanda Lee Tully, “How the Athlete Became Post-Human: A Post-WWII History of Cybernetics and Sport at Ohio State University,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) July 2016.

Supervisor, Adam Pez, “The Machinery of Freedom: Neoliberalism in Cryptocurrency Infrastructures,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) July 2016.

Supervisor, Mark Marshall, “Canadian Science Underground: the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Experiment and the ‘Missing Solar Neutrino Problem’,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) September 2015.

Supervisor, Nathan Crain, “Essence and Obsolescence: Martin Heidegger’s Outsider Critique of Technology,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) December 2014.

Supervisor, Alexander Gatien, “From Operations Research to Systems Analysis: The Science of War in the United Kingdom and the United States: 1936-1961,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) September 2014.

Committee Member, Edward Fenner, “Smashing Atoms and Expectations: Entrepreneurial Science and the Dawn of Publicly-Funded High-Tech Venture Capital at Robert J. Van de Graaff’s High Voltage Engineering Corporation,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) September 2014.

Committee Member, Kelly Bronson, “Public Science and the Debate over Genetically Modified Foods,” (PhD, Communications and Culture) March 2013.

Co-supervisor, Brittney Fosbrook,, “To the Frontiers: Entrepreneurial Pioneers in Contemporary Silicon Valley,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) September 2012.

Supervisor, Jordan Bimm, “Reliable Bodies, Aeromedical Dreams: A History of American Space Medicine: 1948-1964,” (MA, Science and Technology Studies) September 2010.

Supervisor, Vicky McArthur, “Ethics in Virtual Worlds,” (MA, Interdisciplinary Studies) June 2010.