Building on a previous round of notes for Technology in American Lives… I wanted to think of this course as “tracing a technological arc from the earth to waste, traversing through many different spaces, including the atmospheric, the microbial, and the extraterrestrial.” I had (or, have?) a schematic plan of what each week could address. Best laid plans, though…?
As I started to compile a bibliography, I immediately started to run into problems. As I had sort of expected, although not sure to what extent, the neat and tidy arc was more like a maze. So, for the time being, there is no order to anything yet. But it’ll come.
I’ll quickly be tossing out what won’t be useful to the class, while also paying attention to references for what emerge as important foundational research and conceptual ideas that an intro-level course might benefit from.
Although I had a lot of topics I wanted to cover, it looks like certain overarching themes might become more important. Something that immediately jumps out from the bibliography is that, in order to dig into critical lessons a little deeper, it might make sense to sacrifice some of the different and disparate strains in favor of certain clear genealogies (like nuclear science, urban technologies, and bioscience, perhaps).
Shorter chapters or articles are also good for a reading packet. Some books might be good for the reserve shelf as additional material for students.
A few caveats about the following list:
- Most of the biblio, though not all, consists of book-length studies.
- In case you want to try to read all this, I’m certainly not expecting to read every single book cover to cover. Some only have relevant sections or chapters, and I’m looking to see if these start to reveal other readings that could be more vital to the class. I will post other updates later on, as I start to get better organized and shape the course.
- I will usually go over the intro and conclusion to get a quick sense of what the main claims are, in order to assess how it can fit. I’m also looking to bookmark what might be necessary for lecture prep, even if it doesn’t make it into the required readings for whatever reason.
- The list is (always) incomplete. There are still several areas I would like to include (sailing! knots! textiles and sails!), but haven’t stumbled upon the right readings. Suggestions are more than welcome!
- The list is sort of heavy on historical monographs, not (yet) covering theoretical and critical texts that will be folded in later (e.g. Butler; Benjamin), as guided by the readings. It also gravitates, for many reasons both personal and historiographic, toward spatial, architectural, and military studies.
- Sorry but I haven’t tidied up my Zotero database, so there might be some errors in the biblio export file and extraneous categories.
- I’ll be updating as I go along.
- Jump here to get it: