Massimo Mazzotti 470 Stephens Hall Tue-Thu 12:30-2:00 Where do modern science and technology come from? How did they become the most authoritative kind of knowledge in modern societies? How do technology, culture, and society interact? What drives technological change? The course examines these and other related questions using historical case studies from 1600 to… Read more

Our Fellow application and request for proposals for this year’s class of Fellows is now open! Applications will be due on Monday, November 28th. One new exciting change: this year we will be offering a $2000 stipend to each Fellow (an increase of $500 from last year). We are also introducing two new areas of… Read more

Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Professor of History, has been selected as the winner of the George L. Mosse Prize by the American Historical Association and named as a finalist for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature by McGill University. Both honors are in recognition of Laqueur’s book, “The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains” (Princeton… Read more

What do E. O. Lawrence’s cyclotrons in the Berkeley hills have to do with Christian eschatology? At the Graduate Theological Union this spring, the master-level course RSST 3784 will be dedicated to examining the interplay of theology and new technologies. This course will examine how theologians view “technology” in general, how specific technologies have affected… Read more

Anticipation, Agency and Complexity 6-8 April 2017, Trento (Italy) Call for Papers Anticipation is a widespread phenomenon present in and characterizing all types of systems, forcing a re-evaluation of the very idea of science. The present interplay between science and institutions is becoming a major impediment to a further development of science. The traditional, bureaucratic structure… Read more

The review on Bioethics Genome Editing considers the impact of recent advances in genome editing, which have diffused rapidly across many fields of biological research, and the range of ethical questions to which they give rise. The review was carried out by an interdisciplinary Working Group of experts in science, law, philosophy, ethics, sociology and… Read more

Thomas Laqueur wrote a review for the London Review of Books on Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air.  “Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air was published in the US in January to critical and popular acclaim. There had already been ‘an overwhelming response, an outpouring from readers’, to an article Kalanithi published in the New… Read more

CSTMS has received both an Institute of International Studies (IIS) grant and a Social Science Matrix Award to support a new research program in Algorithms in Culture. A foundational concept in computer science, algorithms – loosely defined as a set of rules to direct the behavior of machines or humans – have shaped infrastructures, practices, and daily lives… Read more

On August 20th and 21st, CSTMS brought together scholars from around the Bay Area and beyond for an STS summer school.  At Framing the Infinite: The Social Sciences of Space and Cosmology, graduate students, early career academics, and established scholars—both in and outside the Academy—had the opportunity to interact and learn from each other. Each day began… Read more

CSTMS Co-Director, David Winickoff, participated in the National Academies of Science Committee on Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms, which released its final report this summer. Gene drives are systems of biased inheritance that enhance the ability of a genetic element to pass from an organism to its offspring through sexual reproduction. A wide variety… Read more