On May 20, 2015 I will be presenting my work on the history of masculinity in the computing professions at the UCLA Historicizing Masculinities Colloquium.

The public radio show Backstory devoted an entire show to the history of Women at Work. One of the segments is called Binary Coeds: The Secret History of Women in Programming and features me and my work... <more>

My first book, The Computer Boys Take Over, has been attracting attention in the news recently, largely because of its discussion of gender and computer programming. This article in Fastcompany on the “Evolution of Brogramming” discusses my work... <more>

For the upcoming MICE (Mistakes, Ignorance, Contingency, and Error) Conference in Munich I have prepared a paper entitled “When Good Software Goes Bad: The Surprising Durability of an Ephemeral Technology.”

In theory,... <more>

This week the National Academy of Sciences is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a Sackler Colloquium called “Celebrating Service to the Nation.” Among other things, they are hosting a series of speakers and... <more>

My article “Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? a Social History of an Algorithm” (Social Studies of Science, 2012) was recently awarded the 2013 Maurice Daumas Prize by the... <more>

Writing book reviews is one of the more important but least rewarded of all academic activities. Every professional researcher, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, relies extensively on book reviews to keep current with a large and growing... <more>

The ACM journal Inroads, which is aimed at computer science educators, recently published an article on the teaching of the history of computing that discusses one of my courses. The article is entitled “A call for champions:... <more>

On Friday, October 19, I will be giving a lecture at the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics on my work on gender and computing. The title of the talk is “From Cosmo Girls to Computer Boys: A Gendered... <more>

On February 28 I will be giving a talk at Stanford on gender issues in the history of the computing professions. The seminar is being jointly hosted by the program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the History and Philosophy... <more>

A couple of years ago I presented a paper at the University of Minneapolis on my ongoing research project on computerized decision models. Although the paper was ostensibly about computer chess, the talk took... <more>

Academic careers are based on reputation, and for younger scholars at least part of that reputation is based on your online persona. But online personas are notoriously difficult to manage — unlike other forms of self-presentation,... <more>

This week I will be attending the IEEE Conference on the History of Technical Societies. This is part of a larger celebration of the IEEE’s 125th Anniversary. I gave a talk entitled “Engineering a Professional Identity: The Place of... <more>

This week I will be in Copenhagen to comment on papers for a conference on information technology and work processes. An excellent program of papers on everything from software development practices to the history of computing in the banking industry.... <more>

On Tuesday, April 14, I will be responding to a screening of the documentary “To Dream Tomorrow,” which is about computing pioneer Ada Byron Lovelace, who is often referred to as the first computer programmer.

This past evening I gave a talk for engineering week on women in information technology. Feminizing the field of computer science is some coverage of the event from the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The Open Source Teaching Project represents an attempt to use Web 2.0 technologies and social networking to “create freely interactive media platforms which integrate academic and social content focused on critical thinking, college, and careers.”

Listen here to... <more>

This past year my cyberculture seminar happened to meet on Valentine’s day, and so we did a special session on online dating. One of the things to come out of that was an interview... <more>

This Tuesday, March 4, I will be giving a talk called “Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, and Meat Machines: Computers and the Reinvention of the Body” at Drexel University as part of their Great Works Symposium. The... <more>

Case Files in the History of Computing

This is the second in a series of symposium hosted by the Franklin Institute and the History & Sociology of Science department celebrating the opening of a new... <more>

On February 20th, 2007, Dr. Ensmenger will be giving a talk at the University of Wisconsin entitled “Neither Luddites nor Sages: Physicians and Professors as Reluctant Users of the Internet.”

The seminar is... <more>

The History of Communications in America

The Franklin Institute offers an electronic presentation of its Case Files, a collection of primary source documents that exists as an unknown repository of the history of science and... <more>