Lemelson Center Fellows 1996–Present

2021 ARTHUR MOLELLA DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Thomas Zeller (2022), associate professor of history, University of Maryland, College Park
In his book project, Safety vs. Autonomy: Seat Belts and the Highway Disease, 1950-1990, Thomas Zeller will investigate the complex relationship between innovation and regulation. From the 1950s to the 1990s, engineers, drivers, passengers, regulators, and politicians debated whether seat belts should become mandatory equipment for automobiles and whether their use should be obligatory. Ideas of preventing and mitigating automobile crashes clashed with notions of personal autonomy. Some drivers rejected seat belts as uncomfortable or unnecessary and interpreted them as undue infringements. Regulators, in turn, employed a mixture of encouragement and policing to increase adherence to new requirements. While the interplay of drivers and experts shaped policies and regulations, it also reflected and recast the relationships between individuals and their government: to what degree should elected officials and regulators interfere with individual actions and behaviors in the name of a public good? This question, of course, was never resolved in the abstract. By studying the controversies over seat belts, Zeller will try to understand how Americans found at least partial answers in a complex and messy process.

FELLOWS APPOINTED IN 2020 and 2021 HAVE BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH 2022, DUE TO THE PANDEMIC.

Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellow

Karen Henson (2021), associate professor of musicology, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York
It has long been known that opera singers played a role in the early recording industry. In her book-in-progress, Singing Machines: Early Sound Reproduction and Opera, Karen Henson shows that the relationship between recording and opera in fact dates from as early as the invention of the phonograph in the 1870s. In the book, she uses turn-of-the-century written, mechanical, and audio sources to explore the meanings of this relationship.  

 

 

 

Kara W. Swanson (2020), professor of law, affiliate professor of history, Northeastern University
Who is an American?  In her book project, Inventing Citizens:  Race, Gender, and Patents, Kara Swanson reveals the surprising role of invention in answering that question.  Her research analyzes the growing centrality of inventive ability to American national identity during the early republic, as Americans simultaneously build a modern democracy and a new type of patent system.  She then explores how those excluded from full citizenship made patents into potent political tools.  White women activists and African American leaders argued that patents issued to their group members proved that they had the ability to exercise full civil rights.  By focusing on marginalized groups, Inventing Citizens underscores the inseparability of race, gender, and ability from the history of technology as well as the importance of invention and patents to American political and intellectual history, in a narrative that stretches from the antebellum period to the present. 

Lemelson Center Postdoctoral Fellows

Grace Lees-Maffei (2020), professor, Design History, University of Hertfordshire
Grace Lees-Maffei is currently working on The Hand Book, a design history of hands. Hands help us to learn about the world and to make our worlds, as designers, inventors, consumers and users, yet they are under-explored by design historians. Lees-Maffei’s research at the Lemelson Center will examine: (1) the invention and development of prosthetic hands as objects melding bespoke and reproduceable techniques, and as tools for learning about and operating in the world; (2) the role of hands (prosthetic or not) in learning, through access to museum collections and using Braille; and (3) some of the inventions and innovations made by people with disabilities to customize and adapt mass-produced goods to their needs.

Lemelson Center Predoctoral Fellows

Harry Burson (2020), PhD candidate, Film and Media, University of California, Berkeley
Harry Burson’s dissertation, “The World in Stereo: Sound, Space, and Immersion, 1879-1959,” traces the early development of stereophonic sound from Alexander Graham Bell’s tentative 1879 experiments with multi-channel telephony to the widespread popularization of the technology in the 1940s and beyond. He argues that the techniques and paradigms drawn from the studies of hearing, communication, and information developed at Bell Laboratories have had a far-reaching impact across audiovisual media, changing the relationship between listeners and acoustic space as stereo was rapidly adopted as the global standard for recorded sound. His research at the Lemelson Center will examine the creation of this new mode of acoustic perspective based on an ideal of a normative, able-bodied listener, and a new understanding of the relationship between the hearing self and a networked world of sound.

Ann Daly (2020), PhD candidate, Dept. of History, Brown University
Ann Daly’s research explores the intersection between race, technological innovation, and knowledge production in the antebellum American mining industry. Her project investigates the origins of the American mining industry to argue that enslaved gold miners developed crucial technologies during America’s first gold rushes in North Carolina and Georgia. During her time at the Lemelson Center, she will examine the creation of new refining techniques in the antebellum South, and explore how the gold produced at those mines finances the nascent precious metal mining industry. During the California gold rush, these technologies and companies transferred west. Mining companies and investor networks that took shape during the Southern gold rush brought money and machinery produced by enslaved miners in the South to California’s goldfields in the 1850s.

Pallavi R. Podapati (2020), PhD candidate, History of Science, Princeton University
Pallavi Podapati’s research is at the intersection of the history of medicine, technology, disability, and the body. Her dissertation, “Beyond Boundaries: A History of Paralympic Design and Practice,” examines the development of particular adaptive technologies and sporting practices in the Paralympics, drawing attention to the disabled body as a complex site for the (re)constitution of culture, technology, athletic performance, and of life itself. The project’s central focus is the role of athletes in the design and creation of adaptive sports and sports technologies and how these practices and technologies influenced the development of disability sport through the 20th century into the early 21st century.

Past Fellows

Fellows' affiliations at the time of their fellowship appointments are listed with their names.

• Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellows
• Postdoctoral Fellows
• Predoctoral Fellows
• Professional Fellows
• Other Fellows

Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellows

Amy Bix, professor, Dept. of History, Iowa State University
In her research on the re-gendering of inventiveness and the history of the girls’ STEM movement, Amy Bix explores the evolution of today's interest in cultivating inventiveness among young women. This study represents part of Bix's current book project, Encouraging Engineer Jane and Astrophysicist Amy: American STEM Advocacy for Girls, 1965-Present. Her Lemelson Center research analyzes the development of educational efforts, museum programs, and other campaigns that seek to spread awareness of female inventors. Popular children's books, toys, television shows, and websites also spotlight women inventors, while redefining the nature of “inventiveness” itself, in directions aimed at promoting girls' creativity. This history underlines when, how, and why attitudes toward gender and STEM have shifted, while also investigating the challenges and limits of girls' STEM education and invention-focused outreach.

Rayvon Fouché (2016), director of the American Studies Program and Associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University
Rayvon Fouché used his residency at the Lemelson Center to continue his research at the intersection of sports technology, innovation and human performance, including by making use of objects and archival materials in the national collections at the National Museum of American History for his project, The Machine in the Game: Technology, Design, and the Evolution of Contemporary Sport. Fouché also contributed to Lemelson Center programming and a conference on the topic of innovation in sports.

 

 

W. Patrick McCray (2018), professor, Dept. of History, UC Santa Barbara
Patrick McCray’s research project is called Art ReWired. This new book (under contract with The MIT Press) will examine the collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists from the 1960s onward. By focusing primarily on the activities, motivations, and experiences of engineers and scientists, McCray explores how they created an infrastructure for art-science-technology collaborations and a new creative culture that bridged art, science, and technology.

 

 

 

Stephen Mihm (2017), associate professor, Dept. of History, University of Georgia​
Stephen Mihm is writing a history of standards and standardization in the United States, titled The Search for Standards: Modernity, Markets, and the Order of Things (forthcoming, Harvard University Press).  The project examines how industrial standards governing everything from screw threads to ball bearings to pipe flanges became uniform across national and even international space. Mihm’s study traces how trade associations, professional engineering organizations, and obscure but powerful standards-setting bodies helped banish the bewildering diversity characteristic of the nineteenth century with a remarkable measure of uniformity in the twentieth century.  He suggests that our global economy depends on this ubiquitous, if largely invisible, uniformity; the vast technological systems that make modern life possible cannot operate without them.

 

Postdoctoral Fellows

Caroline Acker (2003), associate professor of history, Carnegie Mellon University
Caroline Acker's research interests stem from her experiences as a historian of medicine and as a public health advocate. The founder of several needle exchange programs, Acker is well informed about the transmission of HIV among street drug users. Her fellowship project will reconstruct how injection drug users have used syringes and other drug paraphernalia since 1900, with an emphasis on how knowledge about how to use this equipment was transmitted among networks of injection drug users. Her work adds the experiences of illicit drug users to an area of medical technology where prior historical attention has focused solely on medical use.