Christopher Capozzola specializes in the political and cultural history of the United States from 1861 to 1945.

He graduated from Harvard College and competed his PhD at Columbia University in 2002. He has held fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Carnegie Scholars Program, and the Social Science Research Council. At MIT, he teaches courses in political and legal history, cultural history, and the history of race, gender and class.

Capozzola's research interests are in the history of war and politics in everyday life. His first book, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen was published by Oxford University Press in Spring 2008. The book examines the relationship between citizens, voluntary associations, and the federal government during World War I, through explorations of military conscription and conscientious objection, homefront voluntarism, regulation of enemy aliens, and the emergence of civil liberties movements.

An article based on his research won the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award of the Organization of American Historians and the Biennial Article Prize of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. A new project brings together his interests in citizenship, the military and migration. Following the Flag: Soldiers, Citizens, and the Philippines is a transnational history of American soldiers in the Philippines and Filipino soldiers in the U.S. military from 1898 to the war in Iraq. Based on government records, court cases, and oral histories, Following the Flag combines social and political history to explore the history of migration, military institutions, and U.S. foreign relations.

David Jones completed his AB at Harvard College in 1993 (History and Science), and then pursued both a PhD in history of science at Harvard University and an MD at Harvard Medical School, receiving both in 2001. After an internship in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, he trained as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, and then worked for two years as a staff psychiatrist in the Psychiatric Emergence Service at Cambridge Hospital. 

In 2005, he joined the faculty at MIT, where he is now sssociate professor of the history and culture of science and technology. From 2004-2008, Jones directed the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine at MIT, organizing a successful series of conferences about race, science and technology. In 2009, he was appointed as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He also teaches as a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 

His initial research focused on epidemics among American Indians, resulting in a book, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Harvard University Press, 2004), and several articles. Jones has also examined human subjects research, Cold War medicine, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and the history of cardiac surgery. His current research explores the history of decision making in cardiac therapeutics, attempting to understand how cardiologists and cardiac surgeons implement new technologies of cardiac revascularization. This research is supported by an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making and by the National Science Foundation.

David Kaiser is an associate professor at MIT, where he teaches in both the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Department of Physics. He completed PhDs in theoretical physics and in the history of science at Harvard.

Kaiser is author or editor of several books on the history of modern physics, including the award-winning book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), which traces how Richard Feynman’s idiosyncratic approach to quantum physics entered the mainstream. His most recent book, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, will be published in June 2011 by W.W. Norton.

In addition to his scholarly publishing in physics and history, Kaiser has written for such magazines as the London Review of Books, Scientific American, American Scientist, and Physics World. His research has been featured in Harper's, Science, and Science News, on several NOVA television programs, and on National Public Radio’s Science Friday. Honors include the Leroy Apker award from the American Physical Society for best undergraduate physics student in the country; the Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society for best book in the field (awarded for Drawing Theories Apart); and the Harold E. Edgerton Award for best tenure-track faculty member at MIT. He has also received several teaching awards from Harvard and MIT.

Jeffrey S. Ravel studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid-17th through the mid-19th centuries.

He is the author of The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Cornell University Press, 1999). He was editor for volumes 35 and 36 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, an annual publication of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is a Co-Founder of CÉSAR, a website devoted to the study of 17th and 18th-century French theater. Teaching interests include Old Regime and Revolutionary France, European cultural and intellectual history, the history of the book and comparative media studies, and Latin America.

Harriet Ritvo teaches courses in British history, environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010); she is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Her articles and reviews on British cultural history, environmental history, and the history of human-animal relations have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The London Review of Books, Science, Daedalus, The American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals in several fields.

She serves on the Board of Incorporators of Harvard Magazine; on the editorial boards of Environmental History, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Agricultural History Review, and Animals and Society, and as editor of the "Animals, History, Culture" series published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past President of the American Society for Environmental History. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Stanford Humanities Center. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and a Graduate Society Award from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.    

She has been a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall (Cambridge University, UK) and Balliol College (Oxford University, UK). She was born in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and received her A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard; she also studied at Girton College (Cambridge University).

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist by training and has recently completed a book based on extended research in Las Vegas among gambling addicts and the designers of the slot machines they play. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2011. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among other sources.

Merritt Roe Smith is Cutten Professor of the History of Technology at MIT and a member of the Institute’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, History Faculty, and Center for International Studies.

His primary research and teaching interest is American industrialization, particularly the role of the military as a catalyst of technological change. He is the author or editor of seven books, the most recent being Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (MIT Press, 2010) and Inventing America: A History of the United States (2nd edition, W. W. Norton, 2006). He is currently working on a book about technology and its implications during the American Civil War. His book on Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Cornell UP, 1977) received numerous honors, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award (Organization of American Historians), the Pfizer Award (History of Science Society), and nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in History. 

He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Other recognitions include an honorary doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Regents Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Senior Fulbright Scholarship (Sweden), and a Thomas Newcomen Fellowship at the Harvard Business School. Smith is past president of the Society for the History of Technology, from which he received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the Society’s highest honor. He is married to Bronwyn Mellquist, an editor, and currently resides in Newton, Mass.