Current Projects
Hunger, Climate Change, and the Technological Imagination
My current research explores the relationship between hunger, climate change, and the technological imagination from 1990 to the present. How are we – global human society – addressing the implications of climate change for food production in a world where agriculture, whether industrial or small-scale, is likely to become more precarious and unpredictable? I am investigating how global and national actors tackle climate change as both a problem with a long background – a slow disaster – and one which will almost certainly require generations of work to address. Are old forms or habits of food security and food rationality shifting, or are they so deeply entrenched as to diminish the scope of possible action? Taking a historical approach to these questions invites us to better understand both how present day approaches are shaped by the past, and how patterns of, and possibilities for, social, economic, and political change are catalyzed.
Select Publications
Books
Technology in Southeast Asian History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2023.
Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies, Leiden: CNWS. 2007
Scholarly Reference Works
Critical Readings in the History of Technology, London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Co-edited with Peter Soppelsa.
Articles or Book Chapters
“Sugar”, in The Oxford Handbook on Agriculture. Edited by Jeannie Whayne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
“Moral Narratives of Technological Change in the Early Green Revolution”. In Thinking Through Science and Technology: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics in an Engineered World, edited by Glen Miller, Helen Mateus Jerónimo, and Qin Zhu. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2023.
“Imagining a Technological Umma: Islam and High Technology in New Order Indonesia”, History and Technology, September 2020.
“Building from the Outside In: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Civil Society in New Order Indonesia”, in Dreamscapes of Modernity, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-hyun Kim (Chicago, 2015).
co-authored w/Donna Mehos, “The Uses of Portability: Circulating Experts in the Technopolitics of Cold War and Decolonization.” Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War Gabrielle Hecht (ed.), (MIT Press, 2011).
“Place, Voice, Interdisciplinarity: Understanding Technology in the Colony and the Post-colony”, History and Technology 26, no. 3 (September 2010).
“Justice, Geography, and Steel: Technology and National Identity in Indonesian Industrialization”, OSIRIS 2009.
“The Emergence of Technological Development and the Question of Native Identity in the Netherlands East Indies”, The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, June 2005.
“Development, Technology, and the Unique Economy of the Colony: the Dual Economy Thesis in Netherlands East Indies’ Development Policies, c. 1920”, in Science, Tropical Medicine, and Empire. Western Europe and the Colonial World Since 1800, Benedikt Stuchtey (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2005.
“Empirical Knowledge, Colonial Authority, and Native Development: The Controversy over Sugar/Rice Ecology in the Netherlands East Indies, 1905-1914.” Environment and History, April 2004. Reprinted in Themes in Environmental History, 6 (White Horse Press, 2016).
“The Trouble with Mechanized Farming: Colonial Politics of Technological Change in the Netherlands East Indies c. 1920.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (1999).
“Takeoff or Self-Sufficiency: Ideologies of Development in Indonesia 1957-1961,” Technology and Culture, vol. 39, no. 2 (April, 1998).