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Faculty Affiliates |
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Ken Alder
Ken Alder, (PhD Harvard), Associate Professor of History and Director of Science in Human Culture Program. He studies the history of science and technology in the context of social and political change. His first book, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815, (1997) won the Dexter Prize from the Society of the History of Technology as the outstanding book in the field of the history of science in the past three years. His next book, The Measure of All Things (Free Press, 2002) treats the origins of the metric system by recounting the adventures of the two men who measured the earth to determine the length of the meter. His current project is a history of the forensic sciences, the first fruits of which will be a history of the American polygraph machine for lie detection. For this work, he has won fellowships from the National Institute for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation. In 1999-2000, Alder was visiting scholar with the Centre de Sociologie et d'Innovation at the Ecole des Mines de Paris (at the invitation of Bruno Latour). He was also a short-term visitor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (at the invitation of Dominique Pestre, director of the Centre Koyre pour l'histoire des sciences). He gave lectures at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, the Centre Koyre, the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Metiers, and the history of science research group at La Villette. |
