Peter Sachs Collopy: CV

Curriculum Vitae
March 2024
1200 E. California Blvd.
MC B215-74
Pasadena, CA 91125
(626) 395-2702
pcollopy@caltech.edu
https://collopy.net/

Experience

2017– University Archivist and Head of Archives and Special Collections, California Institute of Technology.

Lead a team that facilitates understanding of Caltech’s role in history of science and technology. Acquire manuscripts and records, establish policies and procedures, curate public exhibitions, oversee oral history program, and support teaching and research using primary sources. Develop library-wide strategy and policy with University Librarian and other department heads. Responsible for four archivists, an oral history interviewer, an exhibition research assistant, five to ten volunteers, and a $120,000 non-personnel budget.

  • Established a departmental culture of continuous professional development.
  • Converted a processing archivist position from temporary to permanent.
  • Reorganized reference and reading room staffing as shared responsibilities, developing staff knowledge and reallocating a position to hire a digital archivist.
  • Developed a collection development policy, rare materials transfer policy, access and privacy policy, strategic plan, and archival description manual. Revised copyright and image licensing procedures to promote use and legal compliance.
  • Joined Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, providing fellowships for visiting researchers.
  • Worked with direct reports to build record transfer relationships across campus. Acquired manuscripts, photographs, and apparatus by donation and purchase.
  • Led mass digitization of manuscript and records collections. Established policies and procedures for demand-driven digital collection development through digitization on request at the folder level.
  • Overseeing comprehensive reappraisal, digitization, and preservation of film, videotape, and audiotape collections.
  • Established web archiving program and collected over 600 Caltech websites.
  • Leading planning for archives software systems integration and interoperability.
  • Led renovation of small museum, and oversaw establishment of volunteer program.
  • Curated “The Mind’s Eye: Richard Feynman in Word and Image,” which received 4000 visitors, and co-curated “Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930.”
  • Produced “Becoming Caltech, 1910–1930: Presentations from the Archives,” a series of six livestreamed events featuring 19 presentations, with total attendance of 443.
  • Co-organized “Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science,” including “Sitting Down with Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives,” an innovative event showcasing creative student interpretations of records documenting injustice, with attendance of 201. Received the Caltech Center for Inclusion and Diversity’s Dr. Fred Shair Award for Programming Diversity for this work.
  • Collaborated with faculty to incorporate special collections into 15 courses.
2022 Adjunct Professor of History and Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University.
2015– Managing Editor and Web Administrator, History of Anthropology Review.

Converted a print periodical into an open access web publication. Led digitization of back issues for ingest into University of Pennsylvania institutional repository. Supervised cataloging by three student assistants. Built a website and email newsletter. Serve as one of six managing editors, supervising 20 graduate student and early career editors.

2015–2017 Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Digital Humanities Program, University of Southern California. Affiliated with the Department of History, Visual Studies Research Institute, and Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Taught interdisciplinary historical courses integrating primary sources and digital exhibit design. Organized conference on materiality of digital media.

2014–2015 Graduate Fellow for Teaching Excellence, Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Pennsylvania.

Taught workshops for graduate students on syllabus and curriculum design. Observed and advised graduate student instructors.

2009–2015 Board of Directors, Mariposa Food Co-op.

Oversaw a community-owned grocery store, including as president for two years and secretary for one. Led development of membership policy and consensus-based decision-making procedures. Developed voting software. Hired managers. Negotiated with staff. Grew annual revenue from under $1 million to over $5 million and staff from nine to 45.

2002–2008 Software and Web Development Consultant.

Ported computer graphics software for visualizing business accounting for Case Western Reserve University. Developed web application for tracking music practicing. Designed and built websites for musicians and nonprofit organizations.

2006–2007 Camps and Classes Specialist, Great Lakes Science Center.

Taught computer programming to children using Lego robotics. Supervised two staff.

2004–2005 Archives Assistant, Archives, Oberlin College.

Arranged and described records. Trained coworkers on information technology.

2000–2005 Demonstrator, Great Lakes Science Center.

Conducted science demonstrations. Maintained attendance database.

Appointments

2017– University Archivist and Head of Archives and Special Collections, California Institute of Technology.
2015–2017 Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Digital Humanities Program, University of Southern California. Affiliated with Department of History, Visual Studies Research Institute, and Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Education

2015 PhD, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.
2010 MA, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.
History and Sociology of Science Seminar in History and Sociology of Science
Teaching History and Sociology of Science
Doing Science Studies
The Modern Origins of Science
Gender and Science
Biology in the Last Century
Genetics and Genomics
History of Anthropology
The Information Sciences
History of Technology
Research Seminar in History of Technology
History of Computing
Environmental History
Publish or Perish
History The Nature of Sex
Sociology Quantitative Methods
2007 BA with Highest Honors, History, Oberlin College.
Art History Approaches to Western Art
Biology Evolution
Classics Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome
Computer Science Advanced Principles of Computer Science
Programming Abstractions
English History and Structure of the English Language
Teaching and Tutoring Writing Across the Disciplines
German Elementary German
History Medieval and Early Modern European History
Diversity and Cultural Interaction in Medieval Spain
Modern Japan, 1868 to Present
The Scientific Renaissance
Theology, Science, and the Secularization of Europe
History of Modern Science
The Two Cultures? Science, Religion, and Humanism in Modern Society
American Environmental History
Method in Modern European History
Mathematics Calculus I
Discrete Mathematics
Philosophy Ancient Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
Politics Utopian Thought
European Political Theory: Machiavelli to Marx
Environmental Political Theory
Political Theory and Political Education
Physics The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics
Religion Jerusalem: Negotiating Sacred Space
Islam
Hasidism: Revival of the Spirit
Spinoza: Philosophy, Heresy, and Modern Judaism

Publications

Edited Works

2024 Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, with Claudia Bohn-Spector (Caltech Library).
2022 “Video and the Self: Closed Circuit | Feedback | Narcissism,” chapter in Video Theories: A Transdisciplinary Reader, edited by Dieter Daniels and Jan Thoben (Bloomsbury), 108–51.

Journal Articles

2019 “La vidéo et les origines de la photographie électronique,” translated by Jean-François Allain, Transbordeur 3: 26–35. English text available on the web.

Our current association of the digital with progress can distract us from the historical fact that the most sophisticated electronic technologies have often been analog ones, processing information as continuous variations in voltage or current and recording it as continuous variations in magnetic fields. The discourse of the digital can also obscure continuities between electronic media, preventing us from seeing how much analog and digital modes of representing information have in common. Rather than thinking of the recent decline of film as a process of digitization, we might just as productively see it as a culmination of the rise of electronic photography, a phenomenon that has introduced into our visual experience not only the digital but also the analog.

2015 “Race Relationships: Collegiality and Demarcation in Physical Anthropology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51, no. 3: 237–60. Awarded the 2013 John C. Burnham Early Career Award by the Forum for History of Human Science.

In 1962, anthropologist Carleton Coon argued in The Origin of Races that some human races had evolved further than others. Among his most vocal critics were geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and anthropologist Ashley Montagu, each of whom had known Coon for decades. I use this episode, and the long relationships between scientists that preceded it, to argue that scientific research on race was intertwined not only with political projects to conserve or reform race relations, but also with the relationships scientists shared as colleagues. Demarcation between science and pseudoscience, between legitimate research and scientific racism, involved emotional as well as intellectual labor.

citations
2014 “Video Synthesizers: From Analog Computing to Digital Art,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 36, no. 4: 74–86.

In the late 1960s, artists and engineers began building increasingly sophisticated video synthesizers, machines that produced abstract or distorted images by electronically manipulating either a video signal or the cathode ray tube on which it was displayed. This article explores how experimental videographers modeled video synthesizers on audio synthesizers, conceptualized them as analog computers, and starting in 1973, interfaced them with digital minicomputers.

citations

Book Chapters

2024 “Passing in the Hallway: Art and Technology at Caltech, 1968–1972,” in Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, edited by Peter Sachs Collopy and Claudia Bohn-Spector (Caltech Library).
Introduction, with Claudia Bohn-Spector, in Crossing Over, edited by Collopy and Bohn-Spector.
“Between Paradigms: Video and Art Therapy,” in Modernism, Art, Therapy, edited by Suzanne Hudson and Tanya Sheehan (Yale University Press).
2023 “‘Video Is as Powerful as LSD’: Electronics and Psychedelics as Technologies of Consciousness,” in Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics, edited by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock (MIT Press), 333–55.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the invention and availability of new psychedelic drugs, and the growing cultural discourse around them, coincided with those of television, videotape, and computing. The technologies of psychedelics and electronics grew up together, and those using or thinking about one often implicated the other. When Sony and other Japanese manufacturers developed new portable videotape recorders in the late 1960s, for example, new communities of artists and tinkerers emerged around them, first in the US and Canada and then in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. For the first time, declared these enthusiasts, many people could make their own television, breaking the broadcast oligopoly. In describing the psychological and sociological implications of this new technology, many compared it to psychedelic drugs.

2022 “Video and the Self: Closed Circuit | Feedback | Narcissism,” in Video Theories: A Transdisciplinary Reader, edited by Dieter Daniels and Jan Thoben (Bloomsbury), 108–18.

The relationship between video and the self has been one of the central concerns of video theory. Even before videotape became an artistic medium in 1965, though, video, self-observation, and narcissism were already the subjects of a theoretical literature produced by psychiatrists and psychologists. If patients saw how disordered they appeared to others, some psychotherapists suggested, they might be motivated to change. Other clinicians rewatched sessions with patients so that either could pause the video to discuss emotions or experiences which they hadn’t articulated, essentially putting themselves back into a moment in the conversation. Some of the most prominent artists and theorists working with video were directly influenced by this video therapy tradition.

citations

Reviews

2020 “Making Art Do Work,” review of Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture by W. Patrick McCray, Los Angeles Review of Books. October 22.
Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, edited by Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder, Technology and Culture 61, no. 2: 697–98.
2019 The Cybernetics Moment, or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age by Ronald R. Kline, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 41, no. 2: 67–70.
Portable Moving Images: A Media History of Storage Formats by Ricardo Cedeño Montaña, Technology and Culture 60, no. 1: 337–38.
2015 The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, edited by Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking, and Mona Jimenez, Technology and Culture 56, no. 4: 1008–10.

Recent Essays

2020 “Ready, Set, Spark,” Caltech Magazine. Summer.
2019 “Richard Feynman,” in Design & Science, edited by Leslie Atzmon (Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Gallery), 10–11.
2016 “What Does It Mean to Say Millennials Are Having Less Sex?” Nursing Clio. November 1.
“Ego Me Absolvo: Catholicism as Prototype in Paul Ryan’s Experimental Video,” Archée. July.
2014 “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s” (video), Technology’s Stories. October.

Recent Interviews

2020 “Becoming Caltech: A Q&A with Caltech Archivist Peter Collopy,” by Jon Nalick, Caltech Magazine. Spring.
2017 “4 Questions for Peter Collopy,” by Jon Nalick, Caltech Magazine. Fall.
2015 “Video and Technologies of Consciousness: An Interview with Peter Sachs Collopy,” by Deborah Withers, Greatbear Analogue and Digital Media Tape Blog. November 2.

Reports

2018 “History of Physics in the Caltech Archives, and Now on the Web: Hale, Glaser, and More,” with Mariella Soprano, AIP History Newsletter 50, no. 1: 10.
2011 “History of Science Society 2010 Annual Meeting,” with Andrew Hogan, genmedhist no. 15: 4.

Theses

2015 “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Supervisor: John Tresch. Committee: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Nathan Ensmenger, Fred Turner.

In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving images on magnetic tape, previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for artistic expression, psychological experimentation, and political revolution. Video became portable not only materially but also culturally; it could be carried by an individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation to the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ offices to art galleries, and from prisons to state-funded media access centers. Between 1967 and 1973, American videographers across many of these institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing not only practical knowledge about the uses and maintenance of video equipment, but visions of its social significance, psychological effects, and utopian future. For many, video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness, the communal consciousness that—influenced by the evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global village. Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced by the psychedelic research of the 1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as a science of both social systems and interactions between humans and machines, by anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by revolutionary political movements in the United States and around the world.

citations
2010 “Race Relations: Montagu, Dobzhansky, Coon, and the Disputed Concept of Race,” MA thesis, University of Pennsylvania. Supervisor: M. Susan Lindee.
2007 “George Frederick Wright and the Harmony of Science and Revelation,” BA thesis, Oberlin College. Supervisor: Clayton R. Koppes. Committee: Roland M. Baumann, Gary J. Kornblith.

George Frederick Wright was an Oberlin-educated theologian and self-taught geologist who lived from 1838 to 1921. He was among the most influential Christian interpreters of Darwinism as Americans began to debate the theory in the 1870s and 1880s. In his writings, Wright illustrated a method for reconciling evolutionary theory with Christianity. Wright himself was a Calvinist, and he argued that his own conservative theological tradition shared important characteristics with Darwinism. At the turn of the century, however, Wright began to criticize both Darwinism in particular and evolutionary thought generally. A decade later, he was among the authors of a series of pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals, and thus a standard bearer for the conservative wing of American Protestantism that soon developed into the fundamentalist movement. Furthermore, one of the three articles he contributed to The Fundamentals, “The Passing of Evolution,” was a forceful attack on evolutionary thought. Wright’s ideas about Darwinism and Christianity changed dramatically over the course of his life not only because he became more concerned about the place of “orthodox” Protestantism in modern America—although he certainly did—but also because evolutionary and theological thought themselves evolved. In 1880 Wright perceived a number of similarities between the Darwinian and Calvinist orthodoxies. By 1910 the roles of Darwinism in evolutionary theory and Calvinism in Protestant theology had diminished, and the common ground which Wright had staked out as his own field of study was disappearing.

citations

Contributions as Research Assistant

Forthcoming The Power of Distinction: A History of the National Academy of Sciences in American Life, 1863–2013 by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Daniel J. Kevles, and Peter Westwick (Yale University Press).
2020 Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms by Etienne S. Benson (University of Chicago Press).
2016 ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope (MIT Press).
2010 Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History by Roland M. Baumann (Ohio University Press).
2004 The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter by Cynthia R. Chapman (Eisenbrauns).

Works in Progress

  • “Infolding the Self: System and Narcissism from Video Therapy to Video Art.”
  • “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Black Panthers, Videofreex, and the Politics of New Media.”
  • “When Computer Animation Was Analog: Scanimate and the Work of Modeling.”
  • “Iterating Infrastructure: Apparatus Reuse Across Physics Research Programs at Caltech, 1923–1941.”
  • “‘Design by Wholesale’: Darwinism as ‘the Calvinistic Interpretation of Nature.’”
  • “Fragments of a History of Anarchist Anthropology: Situating David Graeber.”

Exhibitions

2024 Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, with Claudia Bohn-Spector, California Institute of Technology.
2021 Gone But Not Forgotten, with Loma Karklins and Heidi Aspaturian, Caltech Hall, California Institute of Technology.
2020 Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930, with Heidi Aspaturian, Loma Karklins, and Elisa Piccio, Beckman Room, California Institute of Technology.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Caltech dramatically reinvented itself, transforming from a manual arts academy to an engineering school, then expanding into a research institute. The school began building its current campus, recruited renowned faculty, constructed sophisticated laboratories, trained students to become leading researchers, and established new relationships with industry and government. On February 10, 1920, the Institute’s trustees acknowledged this transformation by changing the institution’s name from Throop College of Technology to California Institute of Technology. A century later, the Caltech Archives tells the story of Caltech’s early growth through historical documents, objects, photographs, and film, organized into three sections. “Becoming” traces Caltech's evolution through the reformation instigated by George Ellery Hale and catalyzed by World War I. “Building Research” chronicles both the history of science, engineering, and the humanities at Caltech—ranging from the core activities of the 1910s (electrical engineering, chemistry, and physics) to the new fields of the 1920s (genetics, seismology, and aeronautics)—and the architecture and construction of the buildings which housed this research. “Community” explores the lives and culture of the students, faculty, and staff who made up the Institute, including athletics, clubs, the Athenaeum, and the big T that students carved out of the forest on the side of Mt. Wilson.

2018 The Mind’s Eye: Richard Feynman in Word and Image, Beckman Room, California Institute of Technology.

In work and play, Richard Feynman was a distinctively visual thinker. He achieved fame as a theoretical physicist by making sense of the interactions of elementary particles, and in the process inventing the Feynman diagrams that illustrated these interactions. Writing and drawing were also part of Feynman’s life beyond his research. He brought his poetry into the physics classroom, and in middle age learned how to draw and paint in order to share his vision of the world. This exhibition traces not only how Feynman thought and how he experienced the world, but also the events and accomplishments of his life and work, from youth to the Manhattan Project to quantum electrodynamics, and then from The Feynman Lectures to the origins of nanotechnology to investigating the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

2017 “Throop’s Superlative Opportunity”: The Story of the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry and Building a Chemistry Division, with Jennifer Torres, Parsons-Gates Hall of Administration, California Institute of Technology.

Software

2009 webstv: Web application for ranked choice voting, used by Mariposa Food Co-op, the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, and the United States Federation of Worker Coops.
2008 PracticeTracker: Web application for music students and teachers to record progress and feedback between lessons.
2007 Everything2 Facebook Application: Facebook application to display users’ recent Everything2 posts in feeds and profiles.

Honors

2021 Dr. Fred Shair Award for Programming Diversity, California Institute of Technology.
2013 John C. Burnham Early Career Award, Forum for History of Human Science.
2012 School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Scholar, University of Pennsylvania.
2007 Comfort Starr Prize in History, Oberlin College.

Grants and FellowshipsGrants

2023 PST ART: Art & Science Collide Implementation and Publication Grant for “Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920–2020,” ($225,000), Getty Foundation.
2022 Grant to Archives for archival processing of the Robert F. Christy Papers ($10,000), as Co-Principal Investigator with Penelope Neder-Muro, American Institute of Physics.
2020 Pacific Standard Time: Art × Science × LA Research Grant for “Virtual Witnessing: Seeing Caltech Science,” ($83,000), Getty Foundation.
2019 Processing/Cataloging Assistance Grant for archival processing of the Wheeler J. North Papers ($10,000), California State Library.
2017 Grant to Archives for archival processing of the Ronald W. P. Drever Papers ($10,000), American Institute of Physics.
Researcher Residency, Signal Culture.
2015–2017 Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Digital Humanities ($141,274), University of Southern California.
2016 Researcher Residency, Signal Culture.
2014–2015 Graduate Fellowship for Teaching Excellence ($6000), University of Pennsylvania.
2012 Teece Dissertation Research Fellowship ($9500), University of Pennsylvania.
2011 MIT Press Travel Award ($500), Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society.
2009–2012 Graduate Research Fellowship ($122,500), National Science Foundation.
2009 Pottruck Graduate Presidential Prize Fellowship ($4000), University of Pennsylvania.
2008–2013 Benjamin Franklin Fellowship ($258,300), University of Pennsylvania.
2006 Jerome Davis Research Award ($450), Oberlin College.
Leroy S. Heck Jr. Memorial Scholarship, Oberlin College.
2003 National Merit Scholarship.

Recent Presentations and Conference Activity

Invited Talks

2024 “Special Collections and Archives,” with Krystal Tribbett.
Career Diversity Working Group, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. April 2.
“‘Extra-Academic’ Careers” panel.
Holmes Workshop, Yale University. February 12.
2023 “Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech.”
PST ART: Art & Science Collide Faculty Information Sessions, Getty Foundation. June 21 and October 27.
2022 “Archives and Memory,” with Alexandra Minna Stern.
Centering Race and Disability in Histories of Eugenics, Huntington Library. October 15.
“Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community.”
Pasadena Museum of History. September 22.
“Scanimate and the Work of Analog Computer Animation.”
Sound and Technology Working Group, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. April 8.
“Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives.”
Injustice in Science: The Meitner Scandal and Robert Millikan’s Troubling Legacy, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. February 7.
2020 “‘Mirror With a Memory’: Video Self-Observation Between Art and Science.”
Videoanalysen: Methodologische und medienhistorische Aspekte der Betrachtung von Mikro-Interaktion, Philipps-Universität Marburg. December 11.
2019 “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Consciousness and Digitization in the History of Video.”
Rewind and Hit Play, University of California, Los Angeles. April 6.
2018 “Infolding the Self: System and Narcissism from Video Therapy to Video Art.”
50 Years of Video: Vom Portapak zu Instagram, Kunsthochschule Mainz. November 13.
“The Caltech Archives as Modern Wunderkammer.”
LASER Pasadena: Wunderkammer, ArtCenter College of Design. November 5.
“When Computer Animation Was Analog: Scanimation Outside the Digital Paradigm.”
History of Technology Working Group, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. October 16.
2017 “Collections and Projects of the Caltech Archives.”
American Philosophical Society. October 30.
“Soul on Tape: Video, Ethereality, and Spirit.”
Pious Technologies and Secular Designs, Columbia University. October 13.
“Noosphere to Videosphere: Evolutionary Panpsychism from Henri Bergson to Media Art.”
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium, University of California, Los Angeles. May 8.
“Infolding the Self: System and Narcissism from Video Therapy to Video Art.”
History of Science Seminar, University of California, Santa Barbara. February 7.
2016 “Video Synthesizers, Consciousness, and Computing at the Fringe of Analog and Digital.”
Mistakes Were Made 2.0: Computer History Decompiled, New York University. April 15.
2015 “Video Therapy: Self-Confrontation and the Development of a Psychiatric Technology.”
History and Social Studies of Medicine Research Forum, University of California, Los Angeles. December 11.

Submitted Talks

2022 “Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives.”
American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting. February 20.
2021 “Early Video Art through the Looking-Glass.”
Through the Looking-Glass: A Sesquicentenary Celebration, University of York. November 4.
“Uncomfortable Things: Using Collections for Participatory, Creative Engagement with Institutional Histories of Discrimination,” with Maura Dykstra.
Archives * Records 2021. August 6.
“Diversity Questions for Science, Technology, and Healthcare Archives,” with Nora Zaldivar.
Society of American Archivists Science, Technology and Health Care Section Meeting. July 30.
“‘Pass Through the Barrier of the Skin’: Video and Microanalysis at the Boundaries of the Self.”
The Movement Movement: Histories of Microanalysis at the Intersection of Film, Science, and Art, Philipps-Universität Marburg. June 25.
2020 “Eugenics and Commemoration in Science Archives.”
Society of American Archivists Science, Technology and Health Care Section Meeting, Archives * Records 2020. August 20.
2019 “Scanimate: Engineering Commercial Art.”
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Milan. October 26.
2018 “The ArchivesSpace Public User Interface as a Navigation Tool for Digital Repositories.”
ArchivesSpace SoCal Regional Forum, University of California, Irvine. June 28.
2017 “Ampex, Magnetic Recording, and the Continuity of Photographic and Informatic Media.”
Photography and Information Technology, Université de Lausanne. November 16.
“Democratizing Maintenance with The Spaghetti City Video Manual.”
The Maintainers II: Labor, Technology, and Social Orders, Stevens Institute of Technology. April 7.
“‘Our Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine’: Magnetic Recording and the History of Consciousness.”
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Chicago. March 25.
2016 “Psychedelics and Technical Creativity in Cold War California.”
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Annual Meeting, Atlanta. November 6.
2015 “Visual Anthropology and the Transition from Film to Video.”
Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, Denver. November 13.
“Infolding the Self: From Video Therapy to Video Art.”
Re-Create Emerging Researchers’ Symposium, Université du Québec à Montréal. November 4.
“DH, SIGCIS and SHOT: The Place of the History of Technology, Information, and Computers in the Burgeoning Field of Digital Humanities” roundtable.
SIGCIS Workshop 2015: Infrastructures, Albuquerque. October 11.
“Engineering Video Art: Collaboration and Professional Identity.”
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Albuquerque. October 10.
“Scanimate: Analog and Digital as Engineering Paradigms.”
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montréal. March 25.
2014 “Bergsonian Science: Creative Evolution in the Twentieth Century.”
History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Chicago. November 6.
“From Visual Anthropology to Video Therapy.”
Cheiron Annual Meeting, Hood College. June 20.
“Infolding the Self: From Visual Anthropology to Video Therapy.”
First Annual Conference on the History of Recent Social Science, École normale supérieure de Cachan. June 14.
“The Cultural Portability of Early Video.”
Transgressing Media: Critical Themes in Media Studies, New School. April 6.
2013 “Digitizing Video: Synthesis, Computerization, and Experimental Art.”
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Portland, Maine. October 11.
“California Video and Global Networks.”
In-n-Out California: Circulating Things and the Globalization of the West Coast, University of California, Berkeley. September 5.
“Video Therapy: Self-Confrontation and the Development of a Psychiatric Technology.”
American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Meeting, Emory University. May 19.
“Another Media Ecology: Environmentalism and Experimental Video.”
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Chicago. March 10.
“Art and Access: Institutions of Experimental Video in the 1970s.”
Expanding Cinema: Spatial Dimensions of Film Exhibition, Aesthetics, and Theory, Yale University. February 16.
2012 “Guerrilla Television: New York Origins of Experimental Video.”
Researching New York: Perspectives on Empire State History, State University of New York at Albany. November 16.
“Infolding the Self: Video Feedback in Cybernetic Art and Psychiatry.”
Joint Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science and European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, Copenhagen Business School. October 20.
“Race Relationships: Professional and Personal Histories of the Race Concept.”
Joint Meeting of the History of Science Society, British Society for the History of Science, and Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pennsylvania. July 12.
“Guerrilla Television and Media Revolution.”
The State and the Fourth Estate: Media in American History, Boston University. March 25.
2011 “Computing, Video, and Radical Software.”
SIGCIS Workshop 2011: Cultures and Communities in the History of Computing, Cleveland. November 6.
“Cybernetics and the Human Sciences in the Counterculture.”
History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Cleveland. November 4.
“‘Design by Wholesale’: Darwinism as ‘the Calvinistic Interpretation of Nature.’”
Science and Religion in America: The 2011 American Studies Graduate Student Conference, Princeton University. September 24.
“Virtual Revolutions.”
Virtual Histories: 11th Annual Graduate Humanities Forum Conference, University of Pennsylvania. February 18.
2010 “Guerrilla Television and the Utopian Promise of Video.”
Society for Utopian Studies Annual Meeting, Milwaukee. October 31.
“Guerrilla Television and the Utopian Promise of Video.”
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Tacoma. October 2.
“Guerrilla Television and the Utopian Promise of Video.”
k(NO)w tomorrow: Contradictions of Imagining the Future, George Mason University. September 25.
“Guerrilla Television and the Utopian Promise of Video.”
STS Graduate Student Conference, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. February 20.
2009 “Naturalizing Calvinism: The Darwinism and Anti-Evolutionism of George Frederick Wright.”
150 Years After Origin: Biological, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives, University of Toronto. November 24.
“Race Relations: Montagu, Dobzhansky, Coon, and the Divergence of Race Concepts.”
Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology, Drew University. April 4.
“George Frederick Wright and the Evolving Harmony of Science and Revelation.”
Evolution and Religion: Towards a History of an Evolving Relationship, Clemson University. February 13.
2008 “Can We Use Wikipedia Appropriately?”
eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference, Columbus. February 4.

Campus Talks

2022 “Situating David Graeber.”
History of Anthropology Review Annual Meeting, University of Pennsylvania. October 9.
“Crossing Over: Art and Technology at Caltech, 1969–1971.”
Virtual Witnessing: Seeing Caltech Science, California Institute of Technology. February 4.
“Iterating Infrastructure from High Volts to X-Rays to Nuclear Physics: Early Caltech Science in the Archives.”
Physics Colloquium, California Institute of Technology. January 13.
2019 “Into the Archives with Thomas Hunt Morgan: Exploring the Nature of Information through the Humanities at Caltech,” with Maura Dykstra.
TeachWeek, California Institute of Technology. October 16.
“Browse and Search of Digitized Manuscripts.”
Digital Humanities Best Practices Workshop, University of Southern California. April 26.
“Copernicus to Feynman: Paper and Print in the Caltech Archives from 1500 to Present.”
Alumni Association Webinar, California Institute of Technology. April 11.
2018 “From Oscillation to Simulation: Modeling, Analogy, and the Video Synthesizer.”
Digital Humanities Symposium, University of Southern California. April 18.
“Publishing Digitized Manuscript Collections: Navigation and Copyright in the Caltech Archives.”
Digital Humanities Best Practices Workshop: Thinking through the Archives, University of Southern California. April 13.
2017 “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: The Videofreex, the Black Panther Party, and the Politics of New Media.”
ZdC: Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Association Colloquium, University of Southern California. February 24.
2016 “Thresholds for Epistemological Change.”
Conversations Across the Humanities: Epistemological Thresholds, University of Southern California. November 18.
2015 “Consciousness and Digitization in Video History.”
Digital Humanities Best Practices Workshop, University of Southern California. October 29.
“The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s.”
Visual Studies Research Institute Seminar, University of Southern California. October 28.
“Ethics and Social Responsibility for Engineers and Computer Scientists.”
Responsible Conduct in Research Training Workshop, University of Pennsylvania. April 11.
“Designing Your Own Course.”
Center for Teaching and Learning Graduate Student Workshop, University of Pennsylvania. March 3.
“Creating a Syllabus for a Condensed Summer Course.”
Center for Teaching and Learning Graduate Student Workshop, University of Pennsylvania. February 25.
2012 “Wipe Cycle: Feedback and Experimental Video.”
60 Second Slam, University of Pennsylvania. May 12.
“Roots of Countercultural Technophilia.”
History and Philosophy of Science Working Group Spring Workshop, University of Pennsylvania. May 3.
“Databasing Historical Correspondence.”
THATCamp@Penn, University of Pennsylvania. April 25.
“Cybernetic Utopianism: The Politics of Experimental Video.”
Workshop in History and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. January 30.
2011 “Guerrilla Television and the Utopian Promise of Video.”
Art of Research Graduate Symposium, University of Pennsylvania. May 4.

Discussant

2017 Doctoral student presentations.
Photography and Information Technology, Université de Lausanne. November 17.
Patricio del Real, “Poetics of Architecture as Theology of Earthly Realities: The Secular Pedagogy of the Valparaiso School.”
Pious Technologies and Secular Designs, Columbia University. October 14.
Estelle Blaschke, “‘We May Go Down in History as a Film Age’: The Rise and Imaginary of Microfilm.”
USC-LACMA History of Photography Seminar, University of Southern California. January 19.
2016 “Abacuses, Newspapers, and First Dates: Scientific and Scientistic Applications of Computing in the Twentieth Century.”
History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Atlanta. November 4.
2013 “Gaming the History of Technology.”
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Portland, Maine. October 12.

Session Organizer

2021 “Using Collections to Grapple with Institutional Histories of Discrimination.”
Archives * Records 2021. August 6.
2016 “Modes of Creativity in Psychedelic Research,” with Bretton Fosbrook.
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Annual Meeting, Atlanta. November 6.
2012 “Cybernetic Technologies of the Self.”
Joint Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science and European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, Copenhagen Business School. October 20.
“The Social Origins of Personal Computing.”
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Copenhagen Business School. October 5.
“Egalitarianism and Popular Science: The American Anthropology of Ashley Montagu.”
Joint Meeting of the History of Science Society, British Society for the History of Science, and Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pennsylvania. July 12.

Workshop Organizer

2022 “Virtual Witnessing: Seeing Caltech Science.”
California Institute of Technology. January 31 – February 4.
2021 The Molecular Vision of Life Reading Group, with Charles A. Kollmer.
Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science, California Institute of Technology. March 5–26.
2020 “Histories of Eugenics: The Human Betterment Foundation and Beyond.”
Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science, California Institute of Technology. October 30.
“Sitting Down With Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives,” with Maura Dykstra.
Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science, California Institute of Technology. October 2.
“Becoming Caltech, 1910–1930: Presentations from the Archives.”
California Institute of Technology. June 11 – August 20.
2018 “The Historian’s Laboratory: The Beckman Legacy in the Caltech Archives.”
California Institute of Technology. April 5.
2017 “Digital Materialities.”
Digital Humanities Symposium, University of Southern California. April 14.
2014–2015 Graduate student workshops on teaching history and sociology of science
Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Pennsylvania.

Teaching

Claremont Graduate University

University of Southern California

University of Pennsylvania

Oberlin College

  • Tae Kwon Do (spring 2004, fall 2004, spring 2005, fall 2005).

Recent Institutional Service

2018– Committee on Libraries, Archives and Fellowships, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
2017– Administrative Committee on Institute Art, California Institute of Technology.
2022–2024 Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship Committee, Society for the History of Technology.
2020–2022 Co-organizer, Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science, California Institute of Technology.
2019–2022 Steering Committee, Society of American Archivists Science, Technology and Health Care Section.
Outreach Working Group, ARK Alliance.
2021 John C. Burnham Early Career Award Committee, Forum for History of Human Science.
Seeing for Yourself: The Art and Science of Visualizing Hidden Worlds Exhibition Advisory Group, Huntington Library.
2019 Working Group on Institutional Membership, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
2006–2007 Educational Technology Committee, Oberlin College.
2005–2006 Curricular Pathways Strategic Plan Working Group, Oberlin College.
Student Senate, Oberlin College.

Publications

2023– Advisory Editorial Board, Artifact & Apparatus.
2015– Managing Editor and Web Administrator, History of Anthropology Review.
2019–2022 Newsletter Committee, Society of American Archivists Science, Technology and Health Care Section.
2010–2014 Assistant Editor, History of Anthropology Newsletter (now Review).
2007–2008 Senior Developer, Everything2.
2006–2007 Reporter, Oberlin Review.

Peer Review

2024 Leonardo.
2023 Artifact & Apparatus.
2020, 2021 Journal of Western Archives.
2020 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program, National Endowment for the Humanities.
2020 Arts.
2019 ROMchip.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
2018 Access to Historical Records: Archival Projects, National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
2017 History and Technology.
History of the Human Sciences.
2016 Information & Culture.
2014 digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies, edited by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes (Princeton University Press, 2019).
communication +1.
2013 Workshop for the History of the Environment, Agriculture, Technology, and Science.
2010, 2013 MIS Quarterly.
2009 Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine.

Cooperatives

2021–2023 Archives Committee, Oberlin College OSCAlums.
2009–2015 Board of Delegates, Mariposa Food Co-op.
2006–2007 Board of Directors, Oberlin Student Cooperative Association.

Predoctoral Work Experience

2002–2008 Software and Web Development Consultant.
2006–2007 Camps and Classes Specialist, Great Lakes Science Center.
2005–2007 Writing Associate, Writing Center, Oberlin College.
2004–2005 Archives Assistant, Archives, Oberlin College.
2000–2005 Demonstrator, Great Lakes Science Center.

Memberships

2017– Society of American Archivists.
Society of California Archivists.
Los Angeles Archivists Collective.
2010– Society for the History of Technology.
2008– History of Science Society.
2022–2024 Society for the History of Recent Social Science.
2019–2020 American Library Association.
2016–2017 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.
2014–2017 Cheiron.
2012–2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
2012–2016 Society for Social Studies of Science.
2010–2011 Society for Utopian Studies.
2008–2009 American Society for Church History.

Technical Proficiency