Graduate Study in Science and Technology

Themes of science and technology can be incorporated into any History Ph. D. at Vanderbilt.  Rather than focus on science and technology in isolation, Ph.D. candidates – in consultation with their advisor(s) – can incorporate the necessary courses, minor fields and major specialization into the traditional categories of the history Ph.D.  Our core faculty in science and technology can serve as primary advisors for a broad array of research topics, or they can also serve as secondary advisors; allowing for issues of science and technology to be integrated into nearly any research program across the Department of History. Please also see the Forum for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology.

 

Core Faculty in Science and Technology

 

Michael Bess is a specialist in twentieth-century Europe, with a particular interest in the social and cultural impacts of technological change.  He is currently working on a history of the future.

 

 

 

Marshall Eakin is a historian of Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazil and Central America; nation-building; and the history of industrialization.  He is currently writing a book titled Becoming Brazilians, which charts the emergence of an "imagined community" in twentieth-century Brazil.

 

 

 

Sarah E. Igo is an historian of modern America, with an emphasis on Modern U.S. cultural, intellectual, and political history; history of the human sciences; sociology of knowledge; history of the public sphere.  She is currently writing a history of privacy.

 

 

Elizabeth Lunbeck is an historian of the human sciences, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, women and gender as well as twentieth-century US cultural and intellectual history.  She is currently working on a history of narcissism.

 

 

 

Ole Molvig is an historian of science with an emphasis on the physical sciences, as well as popular science and European intellectual and cultural history.  He is also the curator of the Garland historical instruments collection.  He is currently writing a cultural history of general relativity.

 

 

 

Alistair Sponsel is a historian of modern science with special interest in the history of geographical exploration, the environmental and life sciences, the physical and earth sciences, and Britain and the British Empire.

 

 

 

For further information on the faculty specializing in the history of medicine, please look here.