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. Her work studies how collective understandings of social progress are defined by competing discourses of national prestige, labor, and productivity, and how technologies play a formative role in this process.
- Hicks currently teaches courses in the history of technology, STS, computing history, gender and technology, institutional change, and modern Europe.
Education
- A.B., Harvard University
- M.A., Duke University
- Ph.D., Duke University
Curriculum Vitae
Research & Major Accomplishments
Currently completing a book, Compiling Inequalities: Gender, Technocracy, and the Computerization of Britain, 1930-1979 that investigates how the dropping percentage of women computer operators and programmers injured efforts to computerize British government and industry, and ultimately hindered that nation's global political and technological aspirations.
Serves as the Associate Editor for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and also Vice Chair of Operations for the Special Interest Group on Computers and Information in Society within the Society for the History of Technology.
Current Projects
Awards/Honors
- 2013 Arthur L. Norberg Travel Grant Award, Charles Babbage Institute
- 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)
