Whitney Laemmli

Whitney Laemmli is a historian of science and technology with a special focus on the relationship between technoscience, the human body, and modern life. Her current book project, Measured Movements (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), explores how and why human movement became a central object of technoscientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century.

Other publications and projects have investigated the material history of the ballet pointe shoe, the sexual rehabilitation of paraplegic WWII veterans, and the relationship between modern technology and religion. Laemmli has also begun work on a new book which explores a contentious set of twentieth and twenty-first century debates about whether the whole body–and not merely the well-studied brain–played a role in generating, storing, and communicating thoughts and emotions.

Laemmli’s work has garnered fellowships and awards from the Institute for Advanced Study, the SSRC, the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the History of Science Society’s Forum for the History of the Human Sciences, the Society for the History of Technology, and the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, spent 2016-2019 as a member of Columbia University’s Society of Fellows, and was previously an assistant professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University.

Particular areas of ongoing research interest include the history of information and data; religion and technology; the twentieth century life and human sciences; medicine and mind; and art and technoscience.

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, 2016