OU Activities
My primary research field is the cultural
history of American science and technology in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. As a cultural historian, I am interested in what
American science and technology looks like from a multiplicity of
perspectives, and how these perspectives have varied across time and
place. In my research I look at
the development of debates
about how best to study the social and natural worlds, questions about
science and politics, and the dynamics of science and popular culture. I'm
also an affiliate
member of the
film & video studies program.
I regularly teach survey classes in the history of
science, and also teach thematic courses such as
Science, Technology & Politics: International Perspectives (hsci
3433) and Science
and Popular Culture (hsci 1133). I'm excited about the
challenges and opportunities of teaching and researching about history
in the digital age, and I have several pilot webprojects I'm working on.
They'll start coming online in May -- for now, take a look at
my blog, "petri dish".
It's a companion site for the Science and Popular Culture Webfolio that I'm
losing brain cells over as I try to get my mind around CSS.
My interest in technology -- particularly
in communications technologies -- is
also furthered by participation in the Human-Technology Interaction Center
(HTIC) here at OU, which I helped to found; I'm also currently a member
of the steering committee. Under a grant from the NSF Research
Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program we ran six years of an interdisciplinary
program on the topic of human-technology interaction. Each summer I designed the Ethics Workshops,
and I also led team and individual research projects.
The history of science is a natural crossroads for
the humanities and sciences, and I enjoy interacting with students and
colleagues across the entire range of disciplines. I'm also fortunate to
teach at the same university as my husband, Ben Keppel, who
is an associate professor in the History department, where he
teaches courses in 20th-century U.S. History, African-American History,
and Media and Politics.
Hometown I grew up in San
Pedro, Calif., which is where
Los
Angeles Harbor is located. My relatives and their friends and
neighbors were mostly immigrants from places like Yugoslavia and Italy,
and the ocean was an integral part of their livelihoods, whether they
worked cleaning fish in the tuna canneries or loaded and unloaded cargo
ships on the docks. For us kids the ocean was also our playground, and
my own introduction to nature and science was formed by fooling around
in tidepools, seeing what was new at the then tiny local marine museum at Cabrillo Beach and
visiting Bubbles the Whale and all the other sea creatures down the road
at Marineland of the Pacific (now gone!). To the west of San Pedro is
the island of Catalina, and when
we sailed across to visit we would see flying fish, seals, dolphins, and
the occasional shark fin. Two of my favorite things to think about when
I was growing up were coelacanths
and the Loch Ness
Monster.
Education I drove up the 405 freeway to UCLA for college, where I majored in
psychology and was especially interested in questions about how people
learn. I worked with autistic children and children with reading and
learning disabilities, and also earned an M.A. in developmental
psychology at the interdisciplinary department of Human Development at Cornell
University. I later went on to study the history of science -- which I
think of as the history of how individuals and societies have tried to
learn about nature and what they have done with that knowledge -- by
completing a Ph.D. in History/Science
Studies from the University of California at San Diego. After
receiving my Ph.D., I was fortunate to have the opportunity to observe
science-in-action by working for a year at the Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Santa
Monica, Calif.
