John Krige Offered Francis Bacon Award in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Posted August 21, 2019

John Krige, Kranzberg professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of History and Sociology (HSOC), was recently awarded California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) prestigious Francis Bacon Award in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

Offered biennially in the amount of $20,000, the Francis Bacon Award is bestowed on an outstanding scholar whose work continues to have a substantial impact in the history of science, the history of technology, or historically-engaged philosophy of science.

The winner of the Bacon Award is invited to spend one term (10 weeks) as a visiting professor at Caltech to teach and lead a biennial conference that brings together the best younger and established scholars in the area of the Bacon Visiting Professor’s specific interests.

Krige joins a prominent list of previous awardees, such as Jürgen Renn, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. 

Prior to joining Georgia Tech as a Kranzberg professor in 2000, Krige directed a research group in the history of science and technology at the Cité des sceinces et de l’industrie in Paris, and was the project leader of a team that wrote the history of the European Space Agency. Krige’s research focuses on the intersection between science, technology and foreign policy.

Since being at Georgia Tech he has expanded his interest beyond the study of intergovernmental organizations in Western Europe to include an analysis of U.S. - European relations during the Cold War.

Krige has written numerous books and monographs over his career, including American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), and Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe: US Technological Collaboration and Nonproliferation (Cambridge: MIT Press, July 2016). NASA invited him to write its history on the occasion of its 50th anniversary resulting in the book NASA in the World. Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-authored with two of his graduate students, Angelina Long Callahan and Ashok Maharaj.

Krige also served a two-year term as president of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), the largest organization for this field in the world. 

HSOC is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.