Associate Professor & Grad Chair

Graduate Chair

361 Claudia Cohen Hall

Phone

215.898.5893

Education

Ph.D. Cornell University
M.Sc. Oldenburg University
M.Phil. Cambridge University

Research Interests

Heidi Voskuhl's research field comprises the history of technology from the early modern to the modern period. Her broader interests include the philosophy of technology, the history of the Enlightenment, and modern European intellectual and cultural history.

Selected Work

Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society, 2014.

“Emancipation in the Industrial Age: Technology, Rationality, and the Cold War in Habermas’s Early Epistemology and Social Theory.” Forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History.

“Engineering Philosophy: Theories of Technology, German Idealism, and Social Order in High-Industrial Germany.” Technology and Culture 57, issue 3 (2016). 

“Self-Knowledge in the History of Technology: Industrialism, Cultural Analysis, and Desire.” History and Technology 30:3 (2014), 275-279. 

"Producing Objects, Producing Texts: Accounts of Android Automata in Late 18th-century Europe." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007), 422-444.

"Humans, Machines, and Conversations: An Ethnographic Study of the Making of Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies." Social Studies of Science 34 (2004), 393-421. 

"Recreating Herschel's Actinometry: An essay in the historiography of experimental practice." British Journal for the History of Science, 1997 (30), 337-355

Teaching Fields

History and historiography of early modern and modern technology, the European Enlightenment, history of technocracy, philosophy and theory of technology and literature.

Courses Taught

Technology and Society
Technology and Democracy
Information Age
Reading Seminar in the History of Technology

Faculty Bookshelf