About ME:
I've been a faculty member at the University of Delaware since 1992. I came to Delaware after earning my Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University. In my time at UD, I've done a lot of different things including teaching for the Women's Studies Program, serving as co-coordinator of the Center for Material Culture Studies, serving as Department Chair, and directing both the Hagley Program and the History Department's Graduate Program. I've also stepped outside the University as a consultant for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the United States Park Service, and the Delaware Humanities Forum, and even had a small part in a BBC documentary on the history of technology, White Heat. My current outside gig is as President for the Society for the History of Technology
My research focuses on the changing historical relationship between people and the material world. My first book was Steam Laundries: Gender, Work, and Technology in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Johns Hopkins University Press has also published my newest book. Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society (2013) explores the changing ways Americans have understood and managed everyday risks ranging from runaway horses and smallpox to automobiles and roller coasters. I've also co-edited two collections of essays, His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Technology (University of Virginia Press, 1998) with Roger Horowitz, and Gender and Technology: A Reader, with Nina Lerman and Ruth Oldenziel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). In a bit of a departure, I'm just finishing a biography of my great-grandfather, Richard Dorsey Mohun, who worked in Africa at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The project's working title is Soldier of Fortune: An American Life from the Age of Empire. Next up: a project about technology and the senses in mid-century America.
I regularly teach both undergraduates and graduate students. My teaching reflects my wide range of interests. I've taught courses on the histories of technology, gender, food, consumption, as well as mainstream American history. Most recently, I've developed a new course "Americans in the World" that evolved out of my research for Soldier of Fortune. I particularly enjoy helping graduate students with their dissertation research. Topics of the almost-twenty dissertations I've advised range from the landmark sex-discrimination case Kyriazi v. Western Electric to histories of auto repair and design for the disabled.
My research focuses on the changing historical relationship between people and the material world. My first book was Steam Laundries: Gender, Work, and Technology in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Johns Hopkins University Press has also published my newest book. Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society (2013) explores the changing ways Americans have understood and managed everyday risks ranging from runaway horses and smallpox to automobiles and roller coasters. I've also co-edited two collections of essays, His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Technology (University of Virginia Press, 1998) with Roger Horowitz, and Gender and Technology: A Reader, with Nina Lerman and Ruth Oldenziel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). In a bit of a departure, I'm just finishing a biography of my great-grandfather, Richard Dorsey Mohun, who worked in Africa at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The project's working title is Soldier of Fortune: An American Life from the Age of Empire. Next up: a project about technology and the senses in mid-century America.
I regularly teach both undergraduates and graduate students. My teaching reflects my wide range of interests. I've taught courses on the histories of technology, gender, food, consumption, as well as mainstream American history. Most recently, I've developed a new course "Americans in the World" that evolved out of my research for Soldier of Fortune. I particularly enjoy helping graduate students with their dissertation research. Topics of the almost-twenty dissertations I've advised range from the landmark sex-discrimination case Kyriazi v. Western Electric to histories of auto repair and design for the disabled.
