简介

W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the History Department at UCSB. McCray entered the historians’ profession via his background in materials science and engineering. His doctoral research examined the culture and technology of glassmaking in Renaissance Venice. Since 1996, he has written widely on the history of science and technology after 1945 including two books: Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology (Harvard University Press, 2004) is an exploration of the politics, policy, and technology behind the current generation of ground-based telescopes while Keep Watching the Skies: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age (Princeton University Press, 2008) chronicles the activities of citizen-scientists who organized a global network of satellite spotters during the Cold War. When he arrived at UCSB, McCray became more interested in the history of nanotechnology and how it intersected with his prior research on the history of materials. He is a founding member and co-PI for the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UCSB. He currently leads one of the CNS’s research initiatives; this explores the history of nanotechnology and its place in the broader context of the 20th century science and technology. As a historian, McCray is fascinated by the visions of the future that litter the past. He is currently writing a new book about "visioneers" - people who used their technical expertise to promote visions of a more expansive future made possible by the technologies they studied, designed, and promoted. In 2010-11, he shared a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies with Cyrus Mody (Rice University) and Mara Mills (NYU) which will help support the writing of this book as well as a new project on "high tech intellectuals". In addition to this research, McCray is starting a new pilot project which considers the interaction between scientists, engineers, and artists during the first three decades of the Cold War. He is especially interested in the motives and ways these communities collaborated with one another, how Cold-War derived technologies such as lasers and digital computers were enlisted for artistic purposes, and the presence of Cold War themes such as nuclear war, cybernetics, and the Space Race in art from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.