Edward Jones-Imhotep
Edward Jones-Imhotep is Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. A historian of the social and cultural life of machines, he writes about topics ranging from the history of music studios and of artificial life to space technologies and the technological geographies of islands. His research is particularly interested in histories of technological failure — breakdowns, malfunctions, accidents — and what they reveal about the place of machines and the stakes of machine failures in the culture, politics, and economics of modern societies. His first book, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017), won the Sidney Edelstein Prize for the best scholarly book in the field of history of technology. He is currently finishing a second book, Reliable Humans/Trustworthy Machines, examining how people from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries understood machine failures as a problem of the self — a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, or threatened, or presupposed.
