New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency

Amy E. Slaton is a professor of history at Drexel University. She is the author of books on the history of building materials, standards, and labor relations, and on formulations of race in US engineering. She is currently writing a critical history of “diversity” in US science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. She is a coeditor with Tiago Saraiva of the journal History and Technology.

Scott Gabriel Knowles is professor and head of the Department of History at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His work focuses on the history of disaster worldwide. Knowles is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (2011), editor of Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (2009), and he is coeditor (with Richardson Dilworth) of Building Drexel: The University and Its City, 1891–2016 (2016) and (with Art Molella) of World’s Fairs in the Cold War: Science, Technology, and the Culture of Progress.

Sharon Tsai-hsuan Ku is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering & Society at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching focus on the geopolitics and sociology of standards/standardization. Her recent project takes on a comparative angle to examine the political and cultural roots of smart city standards in the United States, Taiwan, and China.

Projit Bihari Mukharji is an associate professor in the history and sociology of science department of the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the history of science in modern and early modern South Asia, with a particular interest in issues of subalternity. He is the author of Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (London, 2009) and Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences (Chicago, 2016).

Rafico Ruiz is the director of research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. He was recently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. His book, Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation and the Promise of Extraction, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Tiago Saraiva is an associate professor in the Department of History of Drexel University. He is the author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (The MIT Press, 2016), and he is currently working on a collective manuscript called “Moving Crops and the Scales of History.” He is the coeditor with Amy Slaton of the journal History and Technology.

Karen Senaga holds a doctoral degree in history from Mississippi State University and is an assistant professor of history and high school social studies at Pierce College in Lakewood, Washington. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled “Tasteless, Cheap, and Southern” on the farm-raised catfish industry in the United States.

Darin Hayton is an associate professor of history of science at Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. He is also on the editorial board for Lever Press and deeply committed to the press’s mission. Typically, his work focuses on the social and political uses of science technology in premodern Europe, and interrogates the ways that cultural values create science and how, in turn, that science shapes those values.

José Torero is an engineer at University College London in the United Kingdom. He works in the fields of safety, environmental remediation, and sanitation, where he specializes in complex environments such as developing nations, complex urban settings, novel architectures, critical infrastructure, aircraft, and spacecraft. He worked on the World Trade Center collapse investigation, the Organization of American States human rights investigation into the murder of forty-three university students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, and he is currently serving in the Grenfell Inquiry. 

Patryk Wasiak is an associate professor at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. He holds MA titles in sociology and art history and a PhD in cultural studies. He is also a former fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His research interests include the cultural history of the Cold War, history of home technologies, and industrial design.