Cyrus C

Cyrus C.M. Mody

Assistant Professor of History

Office: Humanities 309

Phone: 713-348-2553

Email: Cyrus.Mody [at] rice.edu

Fax: 713-348-5207

Prof. Mody teaches the history of science, technology, and engineering. His own research focuses on the history of very recent physical and engineering sciences (~1970 to the present), with particular emphasis on the creation of new communities and institutions of research in the late Cold War and the post-Cold War periods, especially in fields related to the semiconductor industry. His book, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (2011, MIT Press) explores the co-evolution of an experimental technology (the scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope and their variants) and the community of researchers who built, bought, used, sold, theorized, or borrowed these instruments. Currently, he is working on a history of the communities and institutions of nanotechnology, in collaboration with colleagues at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California – Santa Barbara, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, and here at Rice.

Prof. Mody has served on dissertation committees for doctoral candidates in History and Anthropology, and has co-taught (with Carl Caldwell) the History department’s pedagogy seminar. He is available to advise graduate students interested in the history of science or technology (or science and technology studies more generally), and can offer graduate seminars in those fields.

Education:

Ph.D., Cornell University, 2004

A.B., Harvard University, 1997

Book:

Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (MIT Press, 2011).