HSOC Doctoral Students Shine at SHOT Annual Meeting

Posted October 29, 2015

Three students in the School of History and Sociology's History and Sociology of Technology and Science doctoral degree program participated in the 2015 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, held October 8 - 11 in Albuquerque.

Brian Jirout, who currently holds a doctoral dissertation fellowship from the National Air and Space Museum, presented a paper entitled “Civil Remote Sensing for Sale: Commercializing Landsat Image Use, 1978 - 1989.” The paper was part of a panel entitled “’Up in the Air’: Aerospace as Arenas for Public/Private Cooperation and Contention.”

Emily Gibson, a doctoral candidate and holder of a Dean’s Fellowship, also presented at the session. Her paper, “Air France — The World’s Largest Airline: A Commercial Firm as the Chosen Instrument of France’s Colonial Mission, 1948 - 1950s,” utilized archival materials she obtained while serving as a graduate assistant at Georgia Tech’s campus in Lorraine, France.

Gibson also participated in a special Presidential Roundtable entitled “The Future of SHOT: A Graduate-Led Forum.” The session was organized in part by John Krige, Georgia Tech’s Kranzberg Professor of the History of Technology, and second-year HSTS doctoral student Alice Clifton, who presided at the event.

In addition to airing a variety of views regarding the future of SHOT, the session provided Clifton an opportunity to secure signatures endorsing a petition she had drafted calling for creation of a special interest group devoted to graduate student issues. When approved by the SHOT executive council next spring, the SIG would enable students to shape the direction of the society by organizing sessions and other activities, using matching funds provided by SHOT. The students would also gain representation on the society’s executive council.

In addition to the two representatives from HSOC, the panel included participants from Harvard, Yale, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), the Caucasien at Centre-European of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) of France, and the University of Minnesota.

Three HSTS doctoral graduates, Angel Long Callahan (currently a researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory), Prakash Kumar (an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University), and Timothy Stoneman (a lecturer at Georgia Tech Lorraine) also presented papers at the conference.