Eric Schatzberg
| Associate Professor, History of Science
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Special interests and recent research:
History of technology, technology and culture, science and technology in the postwar era.
Publications:
- "Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology Before 1930," Technology and Culture 47 (July 2006): 486-512. Available through Project Muse (subscription required).
- "On Attempting to Construct Alternative Narratives," essay review of John Law, Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), in Technology and Culture 45 (April 2004): 406-12.
- "Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of Aluminum as an Industrial Material," Enterprise and Society 4 (2003): 226-271.
- “Materials and the Development of Aircraft,” in Around Glare: A New Aircraft Material in Context, ed. Coen Vermeeren (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002), 43-72.
- "Culture and Technology in the City: Opposition to Mechanized Street Transportation in Late-Nineteenth Century America," in Technology and History: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Allen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 57-94.
- "Wooden Airplanes in World War II: National Comparisons and Symbolic Culture, in Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Galison and Alex Roland, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 183-205.
- Wings of Wood, Wings of Metal: Culture and Technical Choice in American Airplane Materials, 1914-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). [Out of print, but a few copies still available from Amazon.com.]
- "Ideology and Technical Choice: The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920-1945," Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 34-69. Winner of the 1997 Abbott Payson Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology.
Regularly offered courses:
- 222 Technology and Social Change in History. 3 cr (H-I). Topics in the history of technology of interest to students in engineering and physical sciences. Themes include the social basis of technical change, the impact of technology on everyday life, and ethical issues in technology in the last two centuries. Open to Fr.
- 337 History of Technology. 3 cr (H-A). A survey of Western technology within its social and cultural context during the past 1000 years. Topics include technology in European expansion, the industrial revolution, and the rise of the United States as a technological superpower. P: Jr st or cons inst. Grads must enroll concurrently in Hist Sci 637.
- 339 Technology and Its Critics Since World War II. 3 cr (Z-A). An examination of attitudes to technology from World War II to the present. Topics include atomic fallout, consumer society, auto safety, environmentalism, nuclear power, the counterculture, and appropriate technology. Grads must enroll concurrently in Hist Sci 639.
- 907 Seminar: History of Technology. 3 cr. Research and readings
on a topic of current interest in history of technology. Grad st.
Spring 2007 topic and syllabus: Historiography of Technology.