Join us for a talk by Cyrus Mody, Ph.D. on Mel Chin’s diverse artistic practice. Dr. Mody is an associate professor of history at Rice University, who explores the intersections between science, technology, and society. Professor Mody’s wide-ranging interdisciplinary research will serve as a lens to view Chin’s equally multifaceted practice—one that frequently features contributions and collaborations from the science community—from a history of science perspective.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Cyrus Mody teaches the history of science, technology, and engineering in the modern era (~1600 to the present) at Rice University in Houston. His own research focuses on the physical and engineering sciences in the very modern era (~1970 to the present), with particular emphasis on the creation of new communities and institutions of science in the late Cold War and the post-Cold War periods. His book, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (MIT Press, 2011) explores the co-evolution of an experimental technology (the scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope and their variants) and the community of researchers who built, bought, used, sold, theorized, or borrowed these instruments. Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled The Long Arm of Moore’s Law: Microelectronics and American Science which explores the changes in US university-government-industry partnerships since 1970 driven by changes in the structure of the global semiconductor industry. He is also researching a third monograph, Through Change and through Storm: American Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s, which will examine US scientists’ and engineers’ varied and creative responses to the crises faced by their nation and their disciplines in the Vietnam era. Mody collaborates extensively with colleagues at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, and here at Rice.
