Eindhoven History Lab

CONFERENCE 12th Biennial European Society for Environmental History Conference
2023-08-22 08:00 - 2023-08-26 17:00 UTC
The 12th Biennial European Society for Environmental History Conference (Bern, August 22-26, 2023) will have as its conference theme: Mountains and Plains: Past, present and future environmental and climatic entanglements
Conference website: https://www.eseh2023.unibe.ch/conference/

CONFERENCE: Les historiographies nationales des techniques. Au cœur de l’épistémologie en histoire globale des techniques
2023-09-28 - 2023-09-29
EHV’s Erik van der Vleuten will present the opening keynote.
Conference program link

CONFERENCE SHOT Annual Meeting (Long Beach CA, 25-29 October 2023)
2023-10-25 - 2023-10-29
This year, our SHOT secretariat will again co-organize the annual meeting of the Society for the History Of Technology.
CfP:
For the 2023 Annual Meeting, the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will convene at the historic meeting place of land, sea, wetlands, and built worlds that is Long Beach, California. Shaped by histories of dispossession, extraction, and pollution, as well as by innovation, connection, and resistance, the multicultural city of Long Beach offers an ideal site to explore technological pasts, presents, and futures from local, regional, and thematic perspectives.
Our Society invites participants to explore any theme related to histories of technology around the world. As it aims to foster more diverse and inclusive communities, the Society has decided not to propose a specific conference theme but rather invites submissions of panels and papers that explore anew what has traditionally been centered or overlooked in discussions about the relationship between technology and power. This includes any disciplinary approach to technological pasts, presents, and futures.
As SHOT continues to explore the future of annual meetings for a society with a widely international membership and commitment to accessibility, the conference will include hybrid participation options for both panelists and audiences. The proposal submission form includes the option to designate proposals as hybrid sessions, which might include pre-recorded presentations or a combination of both in-person and virtual presentations as supported by available facilities.
Specifically, the program committee invites works that revolve around themes such as:

Race, including racial bias and racial equity
Migration, refugees, circulation, and movement
Internationalization and de-globalization tendencies
Disability and Accessibility
Non-Western Cosmographies and Periodizations
Empire, Sovereignty, and Decolonization
Labor (formal and informal), and women and minorities in the workplace
Urban and rural economies and their corresponding transformations
Humble, Non-Hyped Technologies
Environment, Sustainability, and the Blue Humanities – including materialities of growth and de-growth
Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Technology
Energy and Waste
Glocal Long Beach – connections between the Southwest U.S. and Latin America (especially Santiago, Chile, site of SHOT 2024) and the Trans-Pacific
Technological tensions and conflicts
Commerce, Infrastructure, and Development

We warmly invite scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds to join our conversations (including those from Anthropology, American Studies, Black/African-American Studies, Communication, Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, Latin Studies, Literary Criticism, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology). We especially encourage scholarship in African, Asian, and Latin American Studies.
SHOT’s program practice consists of prioritizing: a) all underrepresented scholars, whether based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, age, neurodivergence, disability, or geographic location; b) junior scholars hoping to enter into or learn from the history of technology.
The program committee especially welcomes the submission of non-traditional sessions including work-in-progress sessions, roundtables, flash-talks, unconference sessions, and interactive workshops.
Individuals and groups interested in finding others to join an organized session may propose an open session proposal that will be posted on the SHOT-website. Scholars interested in joining one of these sessions are encouraged to contact the organizers as soon as possible. The earlier an open session proposal is sent to SHOT, the earlier it will be posted on the website. Please make sure to leave sufficient time to enable interested scholars to respond, and for the organizers to prepare and submit a fully formed session proposal.
Participation is generally limited to one paper presentation and two additional roles, except by invitation of the SHOT program committee and/or SHOT officers.
SHOT Program Committee
Jethron Akallah (Chair), Josh Grace (Associate Chair), Bess Williamson, Diana Montaño, Itty Abraham

10th GEWINA Woudschoten conference
2024-06-21 - 2024-06-22
The 10th Gewina’s Woudschoten conference will be organized 21-22 June 2024 from Rotterdam (medical history group from Erasmus MC and historians of the EUR). Conference theme: ‘Ecology & Economy: History of Knowledge during the Unequal Anthropocene’.

REPARANDO: Joint SHOT/ ICOHTEC annual conference in Santiago de Chile
2024-07-04 - 2024-07-18
EHL and SHT will participate in and co-organize the joint annual conference of the Society for History of Technology SHOT and The International Committee for the History of Technology ICOHTEC in Viña del Mar (near Santiago de Chile) on July 8-14, 2024. This will the first time that either society meets on the South American continent.
Read the CfP
More info:
Reparando / Repair in the History of Technology
The technological environments we inhabit require continual repair and maintenance in order to function. Yet the people on whom such repairs rely—along with their knowledge and labor—too often remain unseen and undervalued, becoming visible only in cases of infrastructural breakdown or spectacular disaster. The routine invisibility of repair facilitates grand proclamations of technological solutionism, distracting from the requirements for living equitably in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world.
How does our understanding of the history of technology change when we center repair and maintenance? Such a shift involves highlighting users and experiential knowledge. It opens up conceptions of what counts as technological knowledge and who counts as technological actors. Such themes have lurked in our field for some time, mounting in scale and significance over the last decade. Repair is now part of our vocabulary, here to stay. The time has come to make it the thematic core of our annual meeting. The first joint conference between ICOHTEC and SHOT in three decades, to be held bilingually in Viña del Mar, Chile, provides the ideal place for doing so.
Reparando—the gerund of repair in Spanish—holds a special place in the history of Chile, a nation at the intersection of several tectonic plates. Chileans accept seismic activity as part of everyday life, remaining unfazed by mild earthquakes. Of course, the stronger earthquakes are deeply disruptive, destroying cities and communities. In 1960, the deadliest earthquake registered in human history (magnitude 9.5) struck the southern region of Valdivia. Accompanied by a tsunami, the Great Chilean Earthquake destroyed livelihoods and property, and took thousands of lives. This destruction required not just concrete infrastructural repair, but also social and emotional repair for traumatized victims. The Chilean experience highlights the need to approach repair as a practice of human and technological resilience, in which cooperation and compassion are as essential as material rebuilding and fixing.
This is the context in which we invite a critical appraisal of the concept, strategies, and philosophies of repair. How does repair/reparando sustain our built environment and our daily lives? How can we think through brokenness, restoration, and care? What and who counts as “normal,” and how does that affect our infrastructures? How do people excluded from infrastructural benefits use rebuilding, repurposing, adjusting, and reparando as navigational strategies? How do discussions about repair and repurposing reflect social, political, and cultural dynamics? What does reparando look like at different scales, from the individual to the planetary? And how can focusing on these themes open a discussion of what requires repair in our own field of the history of technology – and what methodologies and approaches are needed to enact that repair?
Topics and themes of special interest to the program committee include (but are not limited to):

The ethics, aesthetics, and politics of repair
Adjusting, tinkering, hacking – tactics for times of scarcity
Invisible labor in science and technology
Geographies of repair and care, from the local to the planetary
The role of technology in environmental and climate (in)justice
Ableism, disability, and crip epistemologies in technology studies
Indigenous lands, indigenous knowledge
Queering the history of technology
Technologies of care and healing
Local cultures of repair, repurposing, and recycling
Intersections of repair, design, and engineering
Normies and Others in technological history
The technological dimensions and aftermaths of disasters, emergencies, and crises
Reckoning with colonial pasts and imagining decolonial futures
Repairing the history of technology: methodological and epistemic strategies for the future of the discipline
The role of conservation, preservation, and archives in understanding the past and repairing the field

Joint meeting EASST-4S 2024
2024-07-16 - 2024-07-19 | Amsterdam
The 11th quadrennial joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) takes place in the Netherlands. It is is hosted by the Athena Institute at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), with witch the EHL collaborates e.g. in the Soy Stories project. STS research at Athena aims to contribute to transformative change through involvements in addressing complex societal challenges and by studying and designing science-society interfaces.
Conference website

World Congress of Environmental History 2024 in Oulu
2024-08-19 - 2024-08-23
From 19 to 23 August, the World Congress of Environmental History will be held at the University of Oulu. The conference theme is “Transitions, Transformations and Transdisciplinarity: Histories beyond History”, emphasizing both the arc of time and the importance of bringing diverse approaches to bear on contemporary problems. WCEH2024 will illuminate the value of historical understandings that go far beyond the discipline of history in treating environmental scholarship as an evolving practice, one that is created in conversation across multiple fields, concerns, and communities – and one that can help strategize the core challenges of transitions that lie ahead.
Several EHL staff will participate (Veraart, van der Staeten, da Silva, van der Vleuten, Kreysel).
Conference website: https://wceh2024.com/

Inaugural lecture prof. dr. Anique Hommels (Maastricht University)
2024-09-13
On September 13 2024, Anique Hommels will accept the Foundation SHT special chair in “Sociohistorical Technology Studies with a focus on Urban Sustainable Sociotechnical Transformations” at the Faculteit der Cultuur- en Maatschappijwetenschappen (FASoS) of Maastricht University.
The title of the lecture: “Transforming Cities in Times of Turmoil – Obduracy, Sustainability and Experimentation”.
Watch online

TRANSFORMATIONS 11th Tensions of Europe Conference (Frankfurt Oder/ Poznan, 19-21 September 2024)
2024-09-21 - 2024-09-23
CfP
Conference website
We live in a world of constant change. There are periods, however, of accelerated change in the political, economic, social or technological sphere. Usually, these spheres are closely interrelated and entangled. If this change is of fundamental character, scientists usually speak of ´transformations´. Common examples are the political and economic system changes, i.e. transformations, in Latin America, Southern Europe or Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the past decades.
The aim of the conference is to shed light on technological, but also political, societal and environmental sides of these transformations in Europe and other regions in past and present. Technology can be a major factor to enhance, slow down or ease such transformations. Processes of circulation and appropriation of knowledge, ideas and artefacts provide a broad field of research to better understand aspects of political, societal or environmental transformations in connection with technology. Special attention can be paid to the following themes: (1) technologies as a driver of political, societal or environmental changes or as an obstacle, (2) technological “revolutions”, transitions and “transformations” and their impact on politics, societies and environment, (3) discourses on (technological) changes, especially with regard to sustainability.
As a part of the conference, there will be held a summer school for early career scholars in the days before the conference. Besides of discussing texts relevant for the current topic, meetings with established researchers as well as an excursion is planned.
We welcome contributions on topics related to these themes as well as on general themes in the history of technology and neighbouring fields of interest to the Tensions of Europe network such as trans-border flows, common resources, conflicting interests, hidden integration and cultural practices.
The format of proposals should be as follows:

Proposals for whole panels in traditional or alternative formats (panel title, theme description with max. 300 words, abstracts of papers with max. 150 words each, name, affiliation, short biography of participants) (pdf-format)
Proposals for individual papers (title, abstract, affiliation, short biography of applicant)
Proposals for contributions to a “My PhD in 10 minutes” session (abstract, affiliation, short biography)

Please name your file with your surname. Beside of traditional panel-sessions with a number of papers and a commentator, we also encourage different formats and new ideas. The programme committee will not prioritize between formats if the suggestions promise constructive, stimulating and engaging discussion.
The organisers invite applicants to submit proposals by the end of November 2023 to toe24@europa-uni.de. We will inform applicants by 1 March 2024 whether their contribution has been accepted. There will be available a limited number of reduced participation fees.
The Tensions of Europe Conference is organised biennially by an interdisciplinary community of scholars who study the historical shaping of Europe through the lens of technology and material culture. We encourage constructive interactions between historians of technology and scholars from all other fields of the humanities and social sciences.
The 11th Tensions of Europe Conference will be organized by the Center for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies (https://www.zip.europa-uni.de/en/index.html) and the European New School of Digital Studies (https://europeannewschool.eu/). Both are part of the European University Viadrina, which is located in Frankfurt/Oder – a town and region marked by fundamental political, economic and social changes in previous decades and centuries.
Welcome to Frankfurt (Oder) in September 2024!
The programme committee (Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Susanne Orth, Falk Flade)
CfP ToE24

ToE12 biennial conference
2024-09-24
The 2026 conference of the European interdisciplinary history of technology network Tensions of Europe will be organized by us. More info will follow.

STUDIUM GENERALE HoT lectures: Ruth Oldenziel on CYCLING CITIES
2024-10-16 12:40 - 13:20 (Europe/Amsterdam)
At October 16, Ruth Oldenziel will give a lecture at Studium Generale, TUE.
More info:
Link

From the SG website:
Cycling Cities

Prof. dr. Ruth Oldenziel
Woensdag 16 oktober , 12:40 – 13:20
Blauwe Zaal, Auditorium
Prijs: Gratis (Student)Gratis (Anderen)

Bestellen

Cycling is second nature to everyone who grew up in the Netherlands. But a cycling culture is not unique to our country! From Africa to North America, this lecture will take you on a global journey to explore what makes cycling thrive in some cities and not in others.

With more than 35,000 kilometers of fully segregated bicycle lanes, the Netherlands is renowned for its bicycle-friendly infrastructure and culture. There are more bicycles than people in the country. This mode of transportation has a significant impact on our economy, health and environment.
It wasn’t always like this, and many factors have contributed to the success of Dutch cycling. The research project Cycling Cities looks at 100 years of cycling policy and practice around the world. Why have some cities become true cycling cities and others not? It traces how policymakers, engineers, cyclists, and community groups have made a difference since the early twentieth century. Innovation in non-motorized mobility is key, and in some cities it is abundant. Ruth Oldenziel discusses how smart cycling innovations in different parts of the world are leading to improved urban mobility and more resilient and livable urban regions.
Prof. dr. Ruth Oldenziel is a Professor for The History of Technology at TU/e and is particularly interested in the relationship between Europe and the United States. Her research focuses on the mutual shaping and exchanging of technological knowledge and practices between Europe and the United States in a transnational context. She has extensively researched the integration of cycling into urban planning and its societal impacts. She directs a research program on Sustainable Urban Mobility since the 1850s (SUM) and is program leader of Cycling Cities: The Global Experience (CC) research project – involving 50 cities in 25 countries. In 2025, a new publication Cycling Cities: The African Experience will be released.
Ticket reservation recommended
To be assured of a seat, we recommend reserving a ticket (black “order” button).
SG & USE/ITEC registration
Please register for SG & USE/ITEC by scanning your student ID at the venue prior to the start of the program.
More information about SG & USE/ITEC can be found here.

Tensions of Europe 12th biennial conference in NL!
2024-11-05 10:54 (Europe/Amsterdam)
During the 11th biennial Tensions of Europe Conference in Frankfurt O. last September, we could announce with pleasure that we will host the next conference in the Netherlands.
More info will follow.

Kick-off Dutch interuniversity History of Technology Center
2024-12-06
We hereby cordially invite you to the kick-off event of the new 4TU Centre History of Technology on Friday 6 December 2024 in the old main post-office (currently Neude Public Library) in Utrecht.
The theme of the event is Environmental Histories of Technology in a Digital Age. We aim to identify and explore resonances, joint concerns, possible synergies and identify opportunities to collaborate in research, teaching and engagement; and to discuss how the new interuniversity centre can stimulate and facilitate these.
Interested in participating in the event? Then please register for the event here.

Kick-off event ‘Environmental Histories of Technology in a Digital Age’
Venue
Neude Library – Neude 11, 3512 AE Utrecht
Tentative program
10:00-10:15:
Welcome coffee/tea
10:15– 10:45:
Introduction & Opening
10:45 – 12:00:
Session 1: Building the Centre with PhDs and Postdocs
During this session, PhDs and postdocs will pitch their work, followed by a discussion on the themes and questions that should be(come) part of the Centre’s agenda.
12:00 – 13:00:
Lunch
13:00 – 14:15:
Session 2: Building the Centre within and beyond Academia: next steps for the Global Sustainability Pasts—Presents—Futures agenda
Roundtable. Confirmed panelists: Carola Hein (TU-Delft), Andreas Weber (University of Twente), Harro Maat (Wageningen University & Research), Carianne van Dorst (Nederlands Openluchtmuseum), Abel Streefland (TU-Delft), Vincent Lagendijk (Rathenau Institute. Maastricht University).
14:15 – 14:45:
Coffee break
14:45 – 16:15:
Session 3: Building the Centre together with everyone in the room: research, education and engagement
World café setup with 5-8 themes, 2 rounds.
16:15-16:30
Closing words
16:30-17:00
Drinks
Become part of this evolving new scientific community and join us 6 December 2024!
REGISTER NOW

Erik van der Vleuten (Scientific Director)
Jan Korsten (Managing Director)

STUDIUM GENERALE HoT lectures: Daniel Barber on AFTER COMFORT
2025-01-15 12:40 - 13:20 (Europe/Amsterdam)
Daniel Barber, the new TUE professor of architectural history and theory, has kindly accepted to give an SG lecture on AFTER COMFORT. DESIGN BEFORE AIRCONDITIONING (link 1; link2). The event is scheduled for 15 January 2025.

PEOPLES, PLACES, EXCHANGES, CIRCULATION: 27th International Congress of History of Science and Technology
2025-06-29 - 2025-07-05
From June 29 to July 5, the ICHST will host its 27th congress in Ōtepoti Dunedin, New Zealand.
The theme of the 27th ICHST is “Peoples, Places, Exchanges, and Circulation.”
For more information, key dates and to download your symposia proposal template, please visit the congress website

SHOT 2025 Conference
2025-10-09 08:00 - 2025-10-11 17:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Luxembourg
The 2025 SHOT Annual Meeting takes place at the Belval Campus of the University of Luxembourg in the second week of September. Meeting dates are 9-11 October 2025.
The meeting will be hosted by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH).

Cycling Cities [ Exhibition-Book Launch ]
2026-05-19
by Jan Jansen, Ruth Oldenziel, Annemarie de Wildt

On 19 May 2026 (3:00–5:00 p.m.), the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences) announces a book launch and exhibition opening in memory of anthropologist Sabine Luning(1959–2025), a leading researcher and an important contributor to, and inspiration for, the international research and public program Cycling Cities.
Book launch
Sabine Luning’s research was closely connected to Tamale, Ghana, where she conducted long-term fieldwork and examined cycling as an integral aspect of everyday urban life. Her final article, co-authored with historian Samuel Ntewusu and photographer Gideon Asmah, is published as the opening chapter of the volume Cycling Cities: The African Experience, which will be presented during this event.
Opening exhibition
The book launch will be followed by the opening of the exhibit Bicycles Forever, an international exhibition previously shown at Nuku Studio in Tamale and at TU Eindhoven, and now presented at FSW, Leiden University (19 May–4 July 2026).
The exhibit features a curated selection of bicycle narratives that address themes of mobility, resilience, and everyday practices across the African continent, offering insights into the social and cultural dimensions of urban life.
This event provides an opportunity to reflect on Sabine Luning’s academic legacy and to acknowledge her contribution to connecting research, public engagement, and global perspectives.
