CSTMS Faculty Affiliate Cathryn Carson recently interviewed with Berkeley News, delving into the intricate dynamics of artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on her expertise in 20th-century policy on nuclear power and weapons, Carson considers AI’s potential to improve lives, alongside the essential examination of downstream consequences. In the discussion, Carson highlights historical technological transformations and parallels… Read more

Professor Sandra Eder is an Associate Professor of History here at UC Berkeley.  Her research interests include the History of Medicine and Science, and Gender & Sexuality.  She is interested in the emergence of modern ideas about the self and formulations of identity through scientific knowledge production and in medical practice,  the interplay of gender, sexuality, identity, ethnicity, and medicine,… Read more

Editors: Cathryn Carson and David A. Hollinger Published by the Office for History of Science and Technology (OHST) / CSTMS University of Berkeley, California Standing at the pivot of the twentieth century, J. Robert Oppenheimer holds our imagination in his grip. From otherworldly aestheticism to the leadership of Los Alamos, from the corridors of power… Read more

The June 2023 HSNS special issue, Making Animal Materials in Time, highlights both how the creation and use of animal materials changes over time, and also how continuously extractive that relationship is.  The editors of this special issue are Lisa Onaga and Laurence Douny. Onaga and Douny write: “This special issue, ‘Making Animal Materials in Time’,… Read more

CSTMS Faculty Affiliate and UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Film and Media, Jacob Gaboury, is the recipient of the 2023 CBI Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Award for his 2021 book Image Objects: An Archeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press). Gaboury’s Image Objects offers the first comprehensive history of the University of Utah’s path-breaking human interaction research in computing from… Read more

We are happy to share that former STS DE student, Dr. Melina Packer, will be joining the Department of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse as an Assistant Professor this Fall 2023.

Algorithms have been transforming human society long before the advent of computing. Yet the rhetoric of algorithmic neutrality is more alive than ever, and algorithms are often depicted as obvious and unproblematic—without context and without history. Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000 draws together the history of mathematics and intellectual history to convey the enduring global… Read more