Santa Clara University

John Staudenmaier, S.J.

John Staudenmaier S.J.

Advisory Board Member, Editor "Technology and Culture", University Office Of Mission and Identity, The University of Detroit Mercy

Most of the time, I live and work in Detroit, Michigan, about two miles inside the city limits, on the campus of The University of Detroit Mercy (UDM). Half my worktime has been until recently devoted to teaching (the university’s required engineering ethics course, a survey of U.S. technological style, upper division seminars--”Detroit, The City”; “Individualism and Community in the United States”; “Interpretations of Capitalism”; “Advertising in America”). In the other half of my working life I edit Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology(T&C), co-sponsored now by The Henry Ford, The University of Detroit Mercy, and The University of Michigan at Dearborn. We mail about 2500 issues to libraries and individuals around the world. As editor, I assess the suitability of manuscripts for refereeing, select referees (we like four per article). I work with authors toward T&C’s larger goal -- articles that explore the full range of questions about technologies in relationship with their host cultures. From August 2001 until June 2004, I served as Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Education at UDM. For the 2004-05 academic year I will be Visiting Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University. Then I’ll head back to UDM in time for the next academic year.

I believe deeply in the missions of UDM and of T&C. The university’s commitment to an exceptionally diverse student body, to the city, to its Catholic intellectual identity and to academic integrity makes it an immensely interesting subculture, one I am proud to inhabit. The journal’s commitment to interrogating the many technologies by which resourceful people inscribe their ideologies and goals on the world and in the historical record, a commitment to substantive interpretation of human technological activity, strikes me as vitally important, the more so given the near totemic status of the word “Technology” when the word is used as a symbol for inevitable Western progress.

Both these commitments influence the other dimensions of my professional life. I speak frequently in this country and overseas. sometimes in the academy and sometimes in less scholarly places. I consult with museums about exhibits, with television producers about historical programs, with science and technology reporters about articles in process. I serve on a few boards. When I find the time, I write for publications in academic and public venues, sometimes interpreting the evolving historiography of my professional field, sometimes asking how people use technologies in their search for integrity and intimacy even as they are influenced by those same technologies. A short sampler of titles suggests the kinds of questions that attract my attention.: Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (MIT Press 1985, under contract for 2nd edition); “The Politics and Ethics of Engineering”; “Relating to Technologies as Moral Adults”; “Denying the Holy Dark: The Enlightenment and the European Mystical Tradition”; “Rationality vs Contingency in the History of Technology.”

I also do pastoral work as a Jesuit priest. And, on the personal side, I travel (a bit more than I’d like) and I take some time for gardening and poetry (mostly reading, rarely writing), for motorcycling, for family and friends, and for contemplation in the Jesuit tradition.