Nina E. Lerman Associate Professor, Department of History Steering Committee, Race and Ethnic Studies Director, Maxey Museum

Whitman College

Walla Walla, WA 99362 USA

(509) 527-5888

email: lermanne at whitman dot edu

Whitman links: I'm an advisor for the Race and Ethnic Studies major. Ask me if you have questions! I'm also a Gender Studies advisor.

Do you play early music, or want to? Help revive Whitman's Recorder Consort.

Selected Publications and Presentations:

Children of Progress: Technical Education and Social Order in a 19th Century City, (in progress).

Invited Paper, "Technology: Defined by Exclusion?" Workshop: Technological Cultures. Themes and Methods in the History of Technology, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, February 2010.

"Apprenticeship Industrialized: Technological Knowledge from Household to Shop Floor," Society for the History of Technology, Lisbon, Portugal, October 2008.

"Jim Crow and the White Way: Race, Region, and Progress in Early Electrification," British Society for the History of Science (3 societies meeting), Oxford, England, July 2008; International Congress of the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), Victoria, BC, Canada, August 2008.

Invited Paper, “Beyond Identity: Boundaries of Difference, Relations of Power, Ways of Knowing.” Telling The Past Now: Historiographies For The 21st Century, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, November 2007.

Invited Paper, “Industrializing Know-How: Technological Knowledge beyond the Exclusions of ‘Technology.’” 50th Anniversary Workshop, Society for the History of Technology, Washington DC, October 2007.

Invited Paper, “Jim Crow and the White Way: Thoughts on Race, Progress, and Early Electrification in the US” Program in History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota, February, 2007"

New South, New North: Region, Ideology, and Access in Industrial Education," in Bruce Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (MIT Press, 2004).

"Camouflaged Resistance: Electrification and Industrial Education in the US South, 1890-1920," Faculty Forum, Whitman College, fall 2004

“Apprenticeship's New Clothes, or, Decline and Progress Reconsidered,” Columbia History of Science Group, March 2004

Gender and Technology: a Reader. Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen Mohun, eds. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

"Electricity, Morality, Region, and Race: Ideologies of Technology and Civilization in American Industrial Education," Society for the History of Technology, October 2003; Session organizer for "From the Crucible of Morals to the Digital Divide: Mapping Race and Technological Change in the 20th c US."

My 2001 entry on "Technology" for American Girlhood: an Encyclopedia is available here.

Gender Analysis and the History of Technology, special issue of Technology and Culture, Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, guest editors (Vol. 38 No. 1, Jan 1997).

"The Uses of Useful Knowledge: Science, Technology, and Social Boundaries in an Industrializing City," Osiris 12(1997): 39-59.

"'Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life': Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-19th-Century Philadelphia," Technology and Culture 38(1997):31-59.

"Books on Early American Technology, 1966-1991," in Judith A. McGaw, ed. Early American Technology: Essays in the History of Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850 (Chapel Hill and Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1994).

Some Professional Activities Visible on the Web

Society for the History of Technology (SHOT); Listserv manager, Women in Technological History (WITH). If you'd like to join the WITH listserv, email me.

Editorial Board, H-SCI-MED-TECH, a listserv based at H-Net Humanities On-Line. Learn more about the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology here!