Adelheid (Heidi) Voskuhl

(Travel Fellow, 2017-18)

Adelheid (Heidi) Voskuhl

Travel Fellow

Engineers’ Philosophy: Industrialism, Theories of Technology, and Social Order in the Second Industrial Revolution

Heidi Voskuhl teaches and researches the history of technology at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty at UPenn, she was faculty at Harvard University. She is the author of Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which won the Jacques Barzun Prize for Best Book in Cultural History by the American Philosophical Society in 2014. She received her PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from Cornell University in 2007 and, before that, a graduate degree in Physics from Oldenburg University (Germany) and a graduate degree in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University (UK).

Her current book project is concerned with class conflicts among engineers during their constitution as a modern profession in the so-called Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1890 to 1945) and engineers’ interest, at the same time, in philosophy, specifically the philosophy of technology. Her larger interests include the philosophy of technology, intellectual and cultural history, and literary theory and criticism. At the Linda Hall Library, Heidi will work specifically with the unique holdings of local, national, and international engineering periodicals. In these media, engineers articulated their social, intellectual, and institutional concerns, established themselves as a profession, and read, wrote, and published philosophical texts.