Biographies
|
Home Program (>pdf) Abstracts (>pdf) Biographies Media
|
Philippe Ailleris
European Space Agency, Noordwijk (NL)
Philippe Ailleris is a project controller at the Space Research and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency, in the Netherlands. In 2009 he founded and currently leads the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (UAP) Observations Reporting Scheme Project (www.uapreporting.org), which he initiated under the framework of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. Ailleris' most recent publication is 'UFOs and Exogenous Intelligence Encounters' for the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna.
Debbora Battaglia
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA (USA)
Debbora Battaglia is Five College Anniversary Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA. She has published widely on epistemologies of belonging and alienness, most recently in reference to science and religion confluences in outer space.
Peter Becker
Universität Wien, (A)
Peter Becker teaches history at Universität Wien. His research interests include the cultural history of public administration and state building, the history of biological reasoning about the social and its political implications, and the history of the Habsburg monarchy's engagement with international political projects. His most recent publications include Sprachvollzug im Amt: Kommunikation und Verwaltung im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (2011, ed.) and 'The Coming of A Neurocentric Age? Neurosciences and the New Biology of Violence: A Historian‘s Comment,' in: Medicina & Storia (2010). Peter Becker also co-edits the book series 1800 | 2000: Kulturgeschichten der Moderne.
Etienne Benson
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin (D)
Etienne Benson is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He received his doctorate from MIT’s Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society in 2008 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment from 2008 to 2010. His first book, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (2010), traced the development of wildlife radiotelemetry in the United States from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century as both an instrument of knowledge production and an icon of intensively managed wildness. His work on the history of biodiversity conservation, the ethics of research on endangered species, and human-animal relationships has appeared in Environmental History, the Journal of the History of Biology, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and edited volumes on animal studies and national parks. He is currently working on a project about the history of environmental information politics.
Thore Bjørnvig
Independent scholar, Copenhagen (DK)
Thore Bjørnvig has an MA in the History of Religions, is an independent scholar, and works as a freelance writer. While mainly doing research in areas connected to intersections between science, religion, and technology, he also engaged in research pertaining to prehistoric religion in the Scandinavian Bronze Age. His latest research assignment was at Kroppedal Museum, unit of astronomy, where he studied interactions and boundaries between industry and academia in the creation of the Danish Oersted Satellite.
Daniel Brandau
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Daniel Brandau is a PhD candidate and research associate in the Emmy Noether Research Group 'The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century' at the Friedrich Meinecke Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. He studied history, German language and literature and educational science at Universität Bielefeld where he received his BA in 2007 and his MEdu in 2010. At the University of Cambridge he finished an MPhil in Modern European History in 2009. During his studies at Cambridge, Brandau worked on early German space history, 1880s-1940s, and continues to pursue this research interest in Berlin. His PhD project focuses on 'Visions of Feasibility: Rocketry and Spaceflight Enthusiasm in Britain and Germany, 1920s-1960s', studying visions of future spaceflight and reciprocities with socio-cultural discourse from the period of early rocket societies to the first manned missions.
Thomas Brandstetter
eikones, Basel (CH)
Thomas Brandstetter studied philosophy in Vienna and cultural and media studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. From 2006-2009, he was an assistant professor at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Since October 2009 he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at eikones NCCR Iconic Criticism at Basel. At the moment, his research focuses on the history of crystal analogies in biology. Other research interests include the history of science and technology, controversies in the sciences and the epistemology of astrobiology. Recent publications include: Kräfte messen: Die Maschine von Marly und die Kultur der Technik (2008) and Zeichen der Kraft: Wissensformationen 1800-1900 (2008, co-ed.).
Ralf Bülow
Independent scholar, Berlin (D)
Ralf Bülow studied computer science, mathematics and philosophy in Bonn; his PhD thesis is on mathematical logics. During the 1980s he worked at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In the early 1990s he continued as a freelance journalist reporting on science and technology. Since 1996 he has participated in many exhibition projects about computers, spaceflight, astronomy and physics, including a major exhibition on Albert Einstein. He has also written about science fiction history, and in 2004 he re-issued a German utopian novel from 1930, Das Automatenzeitalter by Ri Tokko. In his younger days, Ralf Bülow was an avid buyer and reader of X magazine.
Martin Collins
National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC (USA)
Martin Collins is a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. His research focuses on the history of the United States in the world after 1945, as seen through the history of technology. In 2006, he received the Society for History of Technology's IEEE Life Member Prize for his article 'One World…One Telephone: Iridium, One Look at the Making of a Global Age.' He is editor of the journal History and Technology (Routledge), and is managing editor of the book series Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, published by the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. His current research is a history of communications satellites and globalization in the 1990s, as seen through the multinational satellite telephony venture, Iridium.
Luca Follis
Lancaster University (UK)
Luca Follis is a lecturer in Criminology at Lancaster University. His work focuses on the relationship between sovereignty, citizenship and legal exclusion. He is currently writing a book manuscript provisionally entitled The Prisoner and the Exception: Law between Sovereignty and Discipline.
Alexander C.T. Geppert
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Alexander Geppert directs the Emmy Noether research group 'The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century' at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. He received master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Geppert has held fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, the EHESS in Paris, the German Historical Institutes in London and in Paris, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, and at Harvard University. Recent book publications include Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2010), New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century (2010, co-ed.), Wunder: Poetik und Politik des Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert (2011, co-ed.) and Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2012, ed.). At present, he is working on a comprehensive cultural history of the European Space Age.
Matthew H. Hersch
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (USA)
Matthew H. Hersch is a lecturer in the Department of History and Sociology of Science of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his PhD During his doctoral studies, he held the 2009–2010 HSS-NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Science and a 2007–2008 Guggenheim Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. Hersch received an S.B. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. He most recently served as the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for the Aerospace History Project of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Hersch specializes in twentieth-century American technology and its relationship to popular culture and is currently completing a book manuscript on the labor experience of American astronauts.
Andrew Jenks
California State University, Long Beach (USA)
Andrew Jenks is an associate professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution (2005), Perils of Progress: Environmental Disasters in the 20th Century (2010), and the forthcoming biography of the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin (2012). Jenks is co-founder of the Russian History Blog and has published widely in both traditional and digital media on Russian history, environmental history, and the history of science and technology. His current project looks at space flight as a key moment in the formation of transnational forms of collaboration and consciousness.
David A. Kirby
University of Manchester (UK)
David A. Kirby was an evolutionary geneticist whose work appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences before leaving bench science to become senior lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester. His experiences as a member of the scientific community have informed his internationally recognized studies into the interactions between science, media, and cultural meanings. His publications include articles in Social Studies of Science, Public Understanding of Science, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, essays in New Literary History, Literature and Medicine, and Science Fiction Studies, as well as a recent book Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema. Kirby is currently working on a book titled Playing God: Science, Religion, and Cinema which examines how cinema served as a battleground over science's role in influencing morality.
Florian Kläger
Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität, Münster (D)
Florian Kläger studied English literature and history at Mainz, Galway (Ireland), Gießen, and Düsseldorf. His doctoral dissertation focused on early modern historiography and examined Elizabethan writings on Ireland for their impact on constructions of the English national past. Following a spell as a translator in the entertainment software industry, he moved on to a postdoctoral position at Münster, where he teaches British and Irish literature and culture in the department of English and work as coordinator of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network 'CoHaB – Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging'. His research interests include questions of individual and collective identity formation, genre theory, Shakespeare Studies, and metaphorology. Kläger's current research project is a book on Reading into the Stars in British and Irish narrative fiction from Chaucer to the present day, with a focus on the contemporary novel. Other projects include a research group on constructions of Europe in early modern English literature.
John Krige
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (USA)
John Krige has PhD's from the University of Pretoria and from the University of Sussex. He joined the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000 as Kranzberg Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society. Prior to that he directed a research group in the history of science and technology in Paris, and was the project leader of a team that wrote the history of the European Space Agency, as well as being engaged in a history of CERN. Krige's research focuses on the intersection between support for science and technology and the foreign policies of governments. Since being at Georgia Tech he has expanded his interest beyond the study of intergovernmental organizations in Western Europe to include an analysis of US-European relations during the Cold War, with particular stress on transnational knowledge flows. He co-edited Global Power Knowledge: Science, Technology and International Affairs (2006). His most recent monograph is American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (2006). A book manuscript dealing with 50 years of NASA's international relations is currently being reviewed by NASA and an academic publisher. He is also co-editor of American Foundations and the Co-production of World Order in the 20th Century (forthcoming 2012).
Roger D. Launius
National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC (USA)
Roger D. Launius is senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, where he was division chair 2003-2007. Between 1990 and 2002 he served as chief historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A graduate of Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, he received his PhD from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1982. He has written or edited more than twenty books on aerospace history, including Smithsonian Atlas of Space Exploration (2009); Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel (2008);Societal Impact of Spaceflight (2007); Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (2006); Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars (2003); Reconsidering a Century of Flight (2003); To Reach the High Frontier: A History of U.S. Launch Vehicles (2002); Imagining Space: Achievements, Possibilities, Projections, 1950-2050 (2001); Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (2000); Innovation and the Development of Flight (1999); Frontiers of Space Exploration (1998); Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (1997); and NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (1994).
William R. Macauley
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
William R. Macauley is a postdoctoral research associate in the Emmy Noether Research Group 'The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century' at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he studied at the University of Manchester where he received his BSc (Hons) in Psychology (1992), MSc and PhD in Science, Technology and Medicine (2006 and 2010). His doctoral thesis Picturing Knowledge: NASA's Pioneer Plaque, Voyager Record and the History of Interstellar Communication, 1957-1977 is on visual representation of scientific knowledge and interdisciplinary approaches to interstellar communication. Macauley's postdoctoral research focuses on ways in which various professional and social groups in the UK and other parts of Europe produced and communicated knowledge about space and spaceflight from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. His publications include a chapter 'Inscribing Scientific Knowledge: Interstellar Communication, NASA's Pioneer Plaque, and Contact with Cultures of the Imagination, 1971-72' in the book Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2012). Macauley is currently working on a monograph based on his doctoral thesis, as well as other publications related to his postdoctoral research.
Neil M. Maher
New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers University, Newark (USA)
Neil M. Maher is an associate professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark, where he teaches environmental history and political history. He has published articles in academic journals including the Western Historical Quarterly, Environmental History, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, edited a collection of essays by historians, scientists, and policy analysts titled New Jersey's Environments: Past, Present, and Future (2006), and co-edited a special issue of the Radical History Review titled Transnational Environments: Rethinking the Political Economy of Nature in a Global Age (2010). His book Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement was published in 2008. Maher is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled Ground Control: How the Space Race Scrubbed the Revolution, which will examine how efforts to put humans on the Moon engaged, and ultimately co-opted many of the political movements of the 'long 1960s.'
W. Patrick McCray
University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2011-12, he is also the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in the History of Science at the California Institute of Technology. McCray entered the historians' profession via his original career as a scientist. He has written widely on the history of science and technology after 1945. His book Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology (2004) explored how scientists build and use today's most modern telescopes. A subsequent project examined the activities of citizen-scientists during the Cold War (Keep Watching the Skies: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age, 2008). He currently leads one of the CNS's research initiatives, exploring the history of nanotechnology and its place in the broader context of the technological enthusiasm and industrial policy in the late 20th century. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Limitless: From Space Colonies to Nanotechnology in Pursuit of the Future, is about people who used their expertise as scientists, engineers, and popularizers to promote visions of a more expansive technological future.
Lisa Messeri
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (USA)
Lisa Messeri completed her dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society in September 2011. She is presently working on a manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation, entitled Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, which concerns the role of place in scientific practice and how ideas of place shape and are shaped by science. Her ethnography examines the techniques used by planetary scientists to transform planets into places. Previous research on the cultural stakes of 'planet,' as made clear by Pluto's 2006 reclassification has been published in the Social Studies of Science. Messeri is presently a Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, involved in a team taught interdisciplinary course for honors freshmen called the 'Integrated Studies Program.'
Agnes Meyer-Brandis
Universität der Künste Berlin, (D)
German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis has a background in both sculpture and new media art. Her work, exhibited worldwide, is at the experimental edge of art and science, exploring the zone between fact and fiction, fantasy and technology. Meyer-Brandis is the founder of the 'Forschungsfloss FFUR/Research Raft for Subterranean Reefology,' a small research institute whose chief aim is to explore and identify subterranean phenomena and unknown life forms. For the past two years her primary focus of research has moved to high altitude environments and their connected realities. In 2007, she conducted an artistic experiment on cloud formation in weightlessness in cooperation with the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR). For a more detailed description of her work, please consult www.ffur.de
Doug Millard
Science Museum, London (UK)
Doug Millard graduated in environmental sciences at the University of Warwick in 1981. He gained his postgraduate qualification in secondary science teaching from the University of Bath in 1983 and joined the Education Department of the Science Museum in London in 1985. Between 1987 and 1991 he curated the chemical industry, gas, plastics and space technology collections. In 1992 he managed the Museum's main collections' store and then coordinated the procurement and installation of the Museum's new computer network. In 1994 he returned to curatorial work and is now Senior Curator for the Information, Communications and Space Technology collections. Millard has produced many space exhibitions, written articles, papers and books including a history of the Black Arrow satellite launch vehicle and its engines, lectured widely and appeared on television and radio. In 2006 he gained his MSc in the history of science, technology and medicine at the University of London and is currently researching a book on the history of the satellite and working on a major new communications and information gallery due to open at the Museum in 2014.
Gonzalo Munévar
Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, MI (USA)
Gonzalo Munévar is professor of humanities and social sciences at Lawrence Technological University. He has a PhD in philosophy of science from the University of California, Berkeley and has served as Nebraska Foundation Professor of Philosophy (Omaha), professor of history and philosophy of science at Evergreen, and visiting professor or fellow at Stanford University, University of Newcastle (Australia), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid), Barcelona, Santiago de Compostela, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh), Kobe Shodai (Japan), University of Washington, and the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include the epistemology of science, evolution, philosophy of space exploration, and neuroscience. Munévar's publications include Radical Knowledge: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and Limits of Science (1981); Evolution and the Naked Truth: A Darwinian Approach to Philosophy (1998); and Variaciones sobre Temas de Feyerabend (2006). Edited volumes include Beyond Reason: Essays on the Philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend (1991); and The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays on the Life and Thought of Paul Feyerabend (2000, co-ed.). He is presently completing a book entitled The Dimming of Starlight: The Philosophy of Space Exploration.
Paul Nolte
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Paul Nolte is professor of modern and contemporary history at Freie Universität Berlin. He received his university education in Düsseldorf, Bielefeld and at Johns Hopkins University. After finishing his PhD in 1993, Nolte served as an assistant professor at Universität Bielefeld. He was a German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. From 2001 to 2005, he joined the faculty of the International University Bremen, and was a visiting professor of European history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2010-11. Nolte has published widely on German and US social, political, and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on social movement, social thought, and political ideology. Since 2004, he has been editor-in-chief of the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft; he also co-edits the book series Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft. At the FU, Paul Nolte has been a founder and co-director of the master's degree program in public history. His most recent published book is Was ist Demokratie? Geschichte und Gegenwart (2012).
Regina Peldszus
Kingston University, London (UK)
Regina Peldszus is a design researcher focusing on soft human factor aspects in extended space exploration missions and related analogues. She holds a master's degree in design studies from Central Saint Martins, London, and is currently in the final stages of her doctoral studies at Kingston University, London. Her doctoral research involves developing countermeasures and design approaches for the behavioral dimension of unprecedented deep space mission scenarios. With a background in design strategy and space studies, she has worked on evidence-based human factor projects for the European Space Agency and contributed to design applications for space mission simulations in Russia and the US. In recent years, she has also worked on real and speculative habitation design using material from the Stanley Kubrick archive in London. Regina Peldszus regularly documents and comments on practical developments and theory of spaceflight design. She has contributed to magazines such as Wired, and projects and workshops for organizations such as the Royal College of Art, the British Council and The Arts Catalyst. She completed the International Space University's SSP at NASA Ames Research Center and the Human Spaceflight program at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. Regina Peldszus is a member of the Space Architecture Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
Robert Poole
University of Cumbria, Lancaster (UK)
Robert Poole is reader in history at the University of Cumbria, UK. In 2000-2001 he was Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at the Department of History, University of Manchester. He is the author of Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (2008), a study of the first views of Earth from space and their impact. Poole is currently working on 'big history' in the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Arnold Toynbee and Olaf Stapledon, and on the origins of the scientific belief in extraterrestrial intelligence. He has also published on the history of the calendar (Time's Alteration, 1998), the history of witchcraft (The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster, 2011), and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular protest, including articles in Past and Present and History. He has lectured extensively on history in Europe, the United States and Tokyo, and broadcast on US National Public Radio and BBC radio and television.
Virgiliu Pop
Romanian Space Agency, Timisoara (RO)
Virgiliu Pop is a researcher at the Romanian Space Agency, where he conducts research in the fields of space law, policy, and astrosociology, and coordinates various space education and outreach programs. Pop studied and lectured at the International Space University, and attended several law schools in Romania and Scotland for his undergraduate, masters and doctoral studies. His publications include several articles and two books, including Who Owns the Moon? Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources Ownership (2009). In 2011, Pop led the first Romanian crew at the Mars Desert Research Station.
Claudia Schmölders
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (D)
Claudia Schmölders studied German literature, musicology and philosophy in Cologne, Zurich, Berlin and New York. In 1973 she received a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin; from 1975 through 1999 she worked as editor at various publishing houses as well as independent author, academic editor and lecturer at the universities of Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Berlin. She held fellowships at the Maison des Sciences de l'homme in Paris and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin; and completed her Habilitation at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Seminar, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in 1997. Since 1998 Claudia Schmölders has been working as Privatdozentin, lecturer, and author. Her main publications include Die Kunst des Gesprächs: Texte zur Geschichte der europäischen Konversationstheorie (1979, 1986); Das Vorurteil im Leibe: Eine Einführung in die Physiognomik (1995, 3d edn 2007); Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (2000, with Sander Gilman); and Hitlers Gesicht: Eine physiognomische Biographie (2000; English 2005).
Matthias Schwartz
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Matthias Schwartz is a research fellow and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. He studied Russian Studies, Polish Studies and modern history in Berlin, St-Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw and wrote his PhD thesis on the cultural history of Soviet adventure literature and science fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s. His other research interests include the interplay of science and arts in Russia from the eigteenth to the twentieth century; Soviet and Post-Soviet popular culture studies; and young Polish, Russian and Ukrainian literature in a globalized world.
Helmuth Trischler
Deutsches Museum, München (D)
Helmuth Trischler is head of research at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, professor of modern history and history of technology at the University of Munich, and director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. His main fields of research are history of innovation systems and innovation cultures; aviation and space history; science, technology and European integration; and environmental history. He is the author or editor of 28 books and ca. 100 articles. Trischler is currently finishing a book on Knowledge Societies and Expert Cultures in Europe Since 1850 (2013).
Christina Vatsella
Université Paris Sorbonne - Paris IV (F)
Christina Vatsella is an art historian based in Paris. She is a PhD candidate in history of art at the Université Paris Sorbonne - Paris IV, after having received scholarships from the Onassis Foundation and the IKY-Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Her research focuses on the history of new media art. Her PhD thesis is on the question of space in the video installation. She is currently teaching history of art and the new media at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Department of Art, Communication and Technology. She has worked at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, at the New Media Department of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Centre de Recherches en Arts of the Université d'Amiens in Picardie. In addition, Vatsella works as a freelance curator and has published articles in French, English and Greek.
Janet Vertesi
Princeton University (USA)
Janet Vertesi holds a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University and an MPhil in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. Her first book manuscript is based on two years of ethnographic immersion with the Mars Exploration Rover mission, in which she examines the use of digital images on the mission for conducting science and robotic operations. She is currently working on a comparative ethnography with the NASA-ESA-ASI Cassini mission to Saturn to elucidate the role of sociotechnical organization in scientific production. Janet Vertesi is a former recipient of the HSS-NASA History Office fellowship in the History of Space Science, alongside several grants from the National Science Foundation. She has published on the history of telescopic astronomy in the seventeenth century, especially the visual production of Johannes Hevelius, on subway mapping, and on various projects in human-computer interaction. She is currently a Link-Cotsen fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, where she is also lecturer in sociology.
Thomas P. Weber
European Comission, Brussels (B)
Thomas P. Weber studied biology in Saarbrücken, Leeds and Bielefeld and graduated with a DPhil in zoology from Oxford University in 1995. After working as a post-doctoral researcher at Uppsala University and the University of East Anglia in Norwich, he worked at Lund University in Sweden from 1997-2005, first as a fellow of the German Research Council, then as an associate professor. Since 2006 Thomas Weber has been working for the European Commission. Weber's scientific work was mainly concerned with the modeling of ecological and evolutionary processes, but his interests also extend to the history of science and the relationship between science and literature. Since 1996 he has been a freelance author for leading German newspapers, especially the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His first book, Darwin und die Anstifter was published in 2000. Issues surrounding science and fiction are covered in the edited volume Science & Fiction II: Leben auf anderen Sternen (2004) and the book Science Fiction (2005).
Peter J. Westwick
University of Southern California, Los Angeles (USA)
Peter Westwick is assistant research professor in the History Department at the University of Southern California, and director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He received his BA in physics and PhD in history from UC Berkeley, and has held fellowships at Yale and Caltech. He is the author ofInto the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004 (2006), and The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974 (2003). Westwick is also editor of Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California (forthcoming 2012). Peter Westwick is currently working on a history of the Strategic Defense Initiative and a history of surfing.
