People
Adelheid Voskuhl
Associate Professor of the History of Science
Prof. Voskuhl is on leave for
2012 - 2013.
Heidi Voskuhl teaches and researches the history of technology from the early modern to the modern period. Her broader interests include the philosophy of technology, the history of the Enlightenment, and modern European intellectual and cultural history. She teaches classes in the history and historiography of technology, the eighteenth century, technocracy, and the philosophy and theory of technology and literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Engineering and Crisis: Technical and Social Elites in Germany and the US during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870 to 1930). It is scheduled for submission to The University of Chicago Press in September of 2013.
Education:
Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, 2007
M.Sc. in Physics, Oldenburg University (Germany), 1998
M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University (UK), 1995
Book:
Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2013), available in April 2013.
Select articles:
“Ambivalenz im Versprechen: Fortschritt und Untergang in der Technikphilosophie der Weimarer Republik.” In Uwe Fraunholz und Anke Woschech, ed. Technology Fiction: Technische Visionen und Utopien in der Hochmoderne. Bielefeld (Germany): Transcript, 2012, 25-40.
“Producing Objects, Producing Texts: Accounts of Android Automata in Late 18th-century Europe.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007), 422-444.
“Motions and Passions: Music-playing Women Automata and Cultural Commentary in Late 18th-Century Germany.” In Jessica Riskin, ed. Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007, 293-320.
“Humans, Machines, and Conversations: An Ethnographic Study of the Making of Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies.” Social Studies of Science, 2004 (34), 393-421.
“Recreating Herschel’s Actinometry: An essay in the historiography of experimental practice.” British Journal for the History of Science, 1997 (30), 337-355
Contact
- Email: avoskuhl@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 496-5226
Classes
- HS 98r: Tutorial - Junior Year
- HS 99: Tutorial - Senior Year
- HS 100: Knowing the World: An Introduction to the History of Science
- HS 162: Science in the Enlightenment
- HS 183: Democracy and Technology
- HS 186: History of Technology: From the Printing Press to the Internet
- HS 200: Knowing the World: Studying the History of Science
- HS 284: Technology and the Text: Machines and Discourse in Historical and Literary Inquiry
- HS 288: History and Philosophy of Technology
