Journal Details
History and Technology
An International Journal
Aims & Scope
History and Technology serves as an international forum for research on technology in history. A guiding premise is that technology—as knowledge, practice, and material resource—has been a key site for constituting the human experience. In the modern era, it becomes central to our understanding of the making and transformation of societies and cultures, on a local or transnational scale. The journal welcomes historical contributions on any aspect of technology but encourages research that addresses this wider frame through commensurate analytic and critical approaches.
A complementary focus is stimulating dialogue between history of technology and allied fields in history and the humanities, with the aim of exploring common issues in explanation, interpretation, and methodology. To facilitate such exchange, the journal solicits essays from a range of scholars on historiography, theory, and intellectual history.
Features in the Journal
To encourage cross disciplinary conversation on broad questions of technology in history and to connect issues of theory with historical practice the journal features three types of analytic reflections. These are:
Forums
This feature brings together several scholars, from different disciplinary vantages, to assess an individual work. Forums will give special emphasis to works produced by scholars “outside” history of technology, but in which technology or technology-inflected assumptions play an important analytic role. Such works may fall into two broad classes:
- General or theoretical works that lean toward setting a broad agenda for historical research (directly or implicitly making claims about technology in history)
- Studies that exemplify the state of the art in scholarship and that prominently incorporate technology as a concern
Works from within the history of technology also are welcome, but should engage questions of cross-disciplinary interest. The preference is for recently published works, but retrospective assessments also are welcome. The goal of a forum is to have a critical exchange, bringing together the author and diverse respondents to constructively examine common concerns in explanation or intellectual framing among history of technology and other scholarly fields.
Historiographic, Field, and Thematic Essays
As one canvasses the humanities manifold research areas and thematic interests one finds technology—as obstinate empirical consideration or as issue for theorization—as a critical element of reflection. In studies of gender, ethnicity, race, material culture, the postcolonial, international relations, globalization, communications/media, visual culture, sociology, anthropology, business, critical theory, and on—this commonality is hard to miss. This feature of the journal seeks to assess these commonalities and the state of these various literatures as they relate to technology in history. Reviews or intellectual histories of literatures, disciplines, fields, themes, or guiding constructs in scholarship are welcome. The goal is to offer critical reflection on this broad sweep of intellectual activity and (as with the journal's Forum feature) engage common concerns in explanation or intellectual framing among history of technology and other scholarly fields. Contributions are encouraged from scholars in all disciplines.
Images, Technology, and History
Scholars are giving increased attention to images as historical evidence. This feature of the journal seeks to analyze images relating to technology, with two aims: To more fully integrate our understanding of technology into broader historical accounts and as a means to reflect on historical method.
At a basic level, images may record a technology's presence in history, depicting where, when, and how it was deployed, as well as the different social, artistic, and cultural contexts in which it was produced and encountered. In addition, images themselves are technological products that may act as catalysts, changing the paradigms through which we see and apprehend the world.
Careful analyses of images, too, can highlight fundamental problems of historical explanation. In their specificity, images address the production of knowledge and culture, as situated in a particular moment in time and space. In their use of conventional codes of representation they speak to larger and enfolding social, cultural, and political structures. Images, in concentrated fashion, push us to understand the interplay between the empirical and interpretation.
The editors of History and Technology invite submissions of short essays (approx. 2000 words) that address the visual history of technology. Essays should focus on 1-3 visual representations, and might approach the images from a variety of different theoretical positions. Possibilities include: the formal or iconographic content of the representations; the social and cultural implications of how different technologies are represented or who used them; the audience and reception of different representations of technologies; the history of different media and their technological antecedents; or the ways in which technology changed the sensory experience of the world. Essays are preferred that discuss the historiographic issues raised through the analysis of images.
Authors must arrange for permission to publish images that accompany an essay. Please consult the editors for guidance.
Please send submissions or queries on the Forum and Essay features to Martin Collins, Editor (collinsm@si.edu) and on the Image feature to Elizabeth Kessler, Image Editor (eakessler1@gmail.com)
Peer Review Policy:
All research articles published in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by anonymous referees.
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