About ME:
I've been a faculty member at the University of Delaware since 1992 and Department Chair since 2013. 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, 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.
Up to this point, most of my research has been about the changing historical relationship between people and the material world. I often describe myself as a social and cultural historian of technology. 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). My current project is something of a departure from my earlier work. I'm writing 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. I've also contemplated returning to the topic of bodies and technology--something I've been thinking and writing about since graduate school.
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 dozen or so 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.
Up to this point, most of my research has been about the changing historical relationship between people and the material world. I often describe myself as a social and cultural historian of technology. 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). My current project is something of a departure from my earlier work. I'm writing 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. I've also contemplated returning to the topic of bodies and technology--something I've been thinking and writing about since graduate school.
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 dozen or so 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.