I am pleased and honored to be part of the Louis Stokes Midwest Regional Center of Excellence conference on Empowering Diverse STEM Innovators to be held virtually from October 22-24.

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I am pleased and honored to be the recipient of the IEEE Golden Core Award. A small number of Golden core awards are granted each year to persons who “served the society in significant ways throughout its 50 years... <more>

In today’s issue of the New York Times, the journalist Clive Thompson has published a brilliant excerpt from his forthcoming book Coders. In it he references my work on the history of women in computing.

At the end of November the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University hosted a two-day event gathering historians and practioners from around the world. I was pleased to be invited to participate in the opening plenary... <more>

The spate of popular media culture coverage of my research on women in computing that surrounded the publication of the Google Manifesto continues unabated. On Equal Pay Day (April 10), my work was featured in Time Magazine in... <more>

One week from today Donna Riley and I will be giving the opening plenary at the 2017 conference of the Society for the History of Technology in Philadelphia. The theme is Technology, Democracy and Participation.

I am pleased to have been appointed the chair of the Informatics department of the newly renamed School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. I look forward to serving my colleagues, students, and School in this new role.

“We’re just starting to acknowledge the work that these women did — but that’s a fault of our history, not a function of their lack of presence. They were invisible, but they weren’t absent.”¹

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On July 6-8, the Universität Siegen is hosting an international conference on computing and work organized by Thomas Haigh & Sebastian Gießmann. The idea behind the conference is that “close attention to... <more>

In early May I will speaking at the SHIFT-CTRL conference at Stanford University. The conference, which is being convened by Tom Mullaney and Ben Allen is aimed at exploring... <more>

I have been traveling and talking about my new environmental history of computing project a fair bit recently. I am particularly excited about my forthcoming talk at the University of Nevada, Reno. Among other things,... <more>

It often surprises my students when I tell them that as much as 60-80% of all software development effort (time and money) goes into software maintenance. After all, software is not a technology that we think of as “breaking down”... <more>

On March 12 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, I will be presenting as part of a panel on the untold history of women in computing. If you happen to be in Austin for SXSW, come see... <more>

On May 20, 2015 I will be presenting my work on the history of masculinity in the computing professions at the UCLA Historicizing Masculinities Colloquium.

The public radio show Backstory devoted an entire show to the history of Women at Work. One of the segments is called Binary Coeds: The Secret History of Women in Programming and features me and my work... <more>

My first book, The Computer Boys Take Over, has been attracting attention in the news recently, largely because of its discussion of gender and computer programming. This article in Fastcompany on the “Evolution of Brogramming” discusses my work... <more>

For the upcoming MICE (Mistakes, Ignorance, Contingency, and Error) Conference in Munich I have prepared a paper entitled “When Good Software Goes Bad: The Surprising Durability of an Ephemeral Technology.”

In... <more>

This week the National Academy of Sciences is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a Sackler Colloquium called “Celebrating Service to the Nation.” Among other things, they are hosting a series of speakers and... <more>

My article “Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? a Social History of an Algorithm” (Social Studies of Science, 2012) was recently awarded the 2013 Maurice Daumas Prize by the... <more>

Writing book reviews is one of the more important but least rewarded of all academic activities. Every professional researcher, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, relies extensively on book reviews to keep current with a large and growing... <more>

The ACM journal Inroads, which is aimed at computer science educators, recently published an article on the teaching of the history of computing that discusses one of my courses. The article is entitled “A call for champions:... <more>

On Friday, October 19, I will be giving a lecture at the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics on my work on gender and computing. The title of the talk is “From Cosmo Girls to Computer Boys: A Gendered... <more>

On February 28 I will be giving a talk at Stanford on gender issues in the history of the computing professions. The seminar is being jointly hosted by the program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the History and Philosophy... <more>

A couple of years ago I presented a paper at the University of Minneapolis on my ongoing research project on computerized decision models. Although the paper was ostensibly about computer chess, the talk... <more>

Academic careers are based on reputation, and for younger scholars at least part of that reputation is based on your online persona. But online personas are notoriously difficult to manage — unlike other forms of... <more>

This week I will be attending the IEEE Conference on the History of Technical Societies. This is part of a larger celebration of the IEEE’s 125th Anniversary. I gave a talk entitled “Engineering a Professional Identity: The Place of... <more>

This week I will be in Copenhagen to comment on papers for a conference on information technology and work processes. An excellent program of papers on everything from software development practices to the history of computing in the banking industry.... <more>

On Tuesday, April 14, I will be responding to a screening of the documentary “To Dream Tomorrow,” which is about computing pioneer Ada Byron Lovelace, who is often referred to as the first computer... <more>

This past evening I gave a talk for engineering week on women in information technology. Feminizing the field of computer science is some coverage of the event from the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The Open Source Teaching Project represents an attempt to use Web 2.0 technologies and social networking to “create freely interactive media platforms which integrate academic and social content focused on critical thinking, college, and careers.”

Listen here to... <more>

This past year my cyberculture seminar happened to meet on Valentine’s day, and so we did a special session on online dating. One of the things to come out of that was an interview... <more>

This Tuesday, March 4, I will be giving a talk called “Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, and Meat Machines: Computers and the Reinvention of the Body” at Drexel University as part of their Great Works Symposium.... <more>

Case Files in the History of Computing

This is the second in a series of symposium hosted by the Franklin Institute and the History & Sociology of Science department celebrating the opening of a new... <more>

On February 20th, 2007, Dr. Ensmenger will be giving a talk at the University of Wisconsin entitled “Neither Luddites nor Sages: Physicians and Professors as Reluctant Users of the Internet.”

The seminar is... <more>

The History of Communications in America

The Franklin Institute offers an electronic presentation of its Case Files, a collection of primary source documents that exists as an unknown repository of the history of science and... <more>