The Contributors
Martina Hacke researches the history of the University of Paris, and the history of communication (messengers, envoys) in the Middle Ages.
Jennifer Hart is an Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University, where she teaches courses in African History, Digital History, History Communication, and World History. Her 2016 book, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press) was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize.
Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping the Spaces of Japanese History project. Her work on mobility history in modern Japan and the Japanese Empire appears in Mobility in History, Transfers, and Technology and Culture.
Roger Turner is a research fellow and public historian at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. His research interests include the use of environmental surveillance and prediction in industrial societies, and how story-telling can engage various publics in scientific, technological, and environmental issues. He curates the blog Picturing Meteorology and recently completed work on Instruments of Change, a playful multimedia exhibit about five surprising scientific instruments.
Andrew Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His first book, Brokering Servitude (NYU Press, 2018), examines how federal immigration policies and private entrepreneurs shaped labor markets for domestic service in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States, and dictated the contractual conditions under which migration occurred. His current research explores the history of Seabrook Farms, a frozen foods agribusiness and company town in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, and European refugees and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s.
Lee Vinsel is an assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and a co-organizer of The Maintainers, an international, interdisciplinary research network focused on maintenance, repair, and mundane labor with things. His book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in spring 2019.
Robin B. Williams, Ph.D., chairs the Architectural History department at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His research focuses on the history of modern architecture and cities, currently focusing on the evolution of street and sidewalk pavement in North America. He is the lead author of Buildings of Savannah (University of Virginia Press, 2016), the inaugural city guide in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series.
Click “back” in the browser window to return to the table of contents.