How to Write Global History of Technology?
The seminar will explore the programmatic question of how history of technology should be written and how the challenge of a global history of technology can be met that takes spatial perspectives into account, that addresses the relations between different spaces and their uneven teporalities, and that can approach materialities and different material cultures. In his research and teaching, our seminar guest David Edgerton focuses on the material and global histories of technology.
Time: Mon 2024-06-17 13.15 - 14.45
Location: large seminar room at the Division, Teknikringen 74d, level 5
Language: English
Participating: David Edgerton, King’s College London
Edgerton's book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Profile Books 2006) received broad recognition in the history of technology and adjacent fields like STS and anthropology and has become a classic on the entangled temporalities of technological innovation, use, and appropriation in a global historical perspective.
Chaired by historian of technology Per Högselius, the seminar will take place in the large seminar room at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. After the seminar there will be the possibility for doctoral students in the history of technology to have an informal discussion with David around fika at the Division.
David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at the Department of History at King’s College in London. He is the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Imperial College, now at King’s College). His research focuses on the technological, industrial, and military history of Britain in the twentieth century and its technocratic and economic underpinnings and consequences, as well as on the material and global histories of technology.