Marie Hicks
Assistant Professor, History
Office: SH 206
Office Hours: Wednesday, 1:30-3:30 (please email for an appointment)
Phone: 312.567.3464
Fax: 312.567.5187
Email: mhicks1@iit.edu
Web: click here
Expertise
- Marie Hicks is a historian of technology, gender, and modern Europe, specializing in the history of computing. Her recent work focuses on labor and technological change in Britain, and on investigating how 20th century efforts to computerize changed gendered and classed expectations associated with machine work. In general, her work studies how connections between national prestige, labor, and productivity define collective understandings of technological progress, and how that relates to social progress. She is particularly interested in the global history of computing.
- Hicks currently teaches a course in the history of computing and will also offer courses in the history of technology, gender and technology, and the history of communication.
Education
- A.B., Harvard University
- M.A., Duke University
- Ph.D., Duke University
Curriculum Vitae
Research & Major Accomplishments
Is currently working on a book manuscript on the broader impacts of the gendered labor changes attendant on early British efforts to computerize office work in government and industry.
Is also currently serving as chair of the workshop programming committee for the Special Interest Group on Computers and Information in Society within the Society for the History of Technology.
Current Projects
- BOOK PROJECT: Working Title: Gendering Data: Feminization, Masculinization, and Computing in British Government and Industry, 1940-1980
- ARTICLES IN PROGRESS: “Keeping Technology Safe: U.S. and British Computing Exports during the Cold War”
- “‘The World Looks to Britain’: British Computing Companies’ Attempt to Capture the Indian Market, 1955-1965”
Awards/Honors
- National Science Foundation Science and Society Dissertation Research Grant
- Charles Babbage Institute’s Tomash Fellowship for History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota
Patents
Books
Selected Publications
"Only the Clothes Changed: Women Operators in British Computing and Advertising, 1950-1970," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 2 (October-December 2010).
"Meritocracy and Feminization in Conflict: Computerization in the British Government" in Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing, ed. Thomas Misa (IEEE-CS Press/Wiley, 2010).
"Repurposing Turing's Human Brake." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 4 (October-December 2008).
"Integrating Women at Oxford and Harvard Universities, 1964-1977." In Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History, ed. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Hicks also occasionally contributes blog posts at sigcis.org
Professional Society Memberships
- Society for the History of Technology
- Special Interest Group on Computers and Information in Society
- American Historical Association
- Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
