Rational Fog: Science, Technology and Modern War

Join us as we welcome Mt. Airyite Susan Lindee, professor of History and Sociology of Science at University of Pennsylvania. She’ll be discussing her new book about the history of science and war, published by Harvard University Press this fall. The book explores the history of science and technology in war and explores how human intelligence has been leveraged to produce massive human injury. Modern science and the modern state essentially grew up together in Europe, she shows, which means that evolving relationships between socially sanctioned violence and sophisticated technical expertise are fundamental to human history. Their interrelationship was at the heart of the rise of the sovereign state and the European conquest of much of the rest of the world.
 
In conversation with Susan will be Alex Wellerstein, Assistant Professor and Director of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States,” forthcoming from University of Chicago press, 2021.