Virginia Tech® home

Faculty and Staff

Faculty and Staff Directory

Faculty

Department Faculty

  • Bio Item
    Richard F. Hirsh , bio

    Professor | Specialties: Technology; Science; Research Methods | richards@vt.edu

  • Bio Item
    Janet Abbate , bio

    Janet Abbate's work focuses on the history, culture, and policy issues of the internet and computing. Her book Inventing the Internet has become the standard reference on the history of the Internet. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing explores how gender has shaped computing and suggests how the experiences of female pioneers can inform current efforts to broaden participation in science and technology.

  • Bio Item
    John Aggrey , bio

    John K. Aggrey studies risk and infectious diseases, focusing on rural and urban populations in Africa. He has studied Ebola and COVID-19, most recently focusing on how communities construct a sense of risk and how social and political contexts shape emerging infectious diseases. John also investigates the vital role of human relationships in epidemic preparedness, challenging conventional models that overly rely on technological and logistical solutions.

  • Bio Item
    Barbara L. Allen , bio

    Barbara Allen’s research focuses on environmental justice, namely, participatory projects that engage the public in shaping environmental health science. She works with local communities in heavily polluted industrial regions in France and the U.S. to produce rigorous environmental health data that can assist residents in their advocacy for policy and regulatory change. In 2022, Professor Allen completed a decade-long public health project in France’s largest industrial region near the port of Marseille.

  • Bio Item
    Daniel Breslau , bio

    Daniel Breslau works at the intersection of Economic Sociology and Science and Technology Studies, with a focus on the sociology and politics of electricity markets. He is interested in the ways that the politics of climate and energy transition interact with the politics and science of market institutions. His has published widely on the history and sociology of the social sciences, particularly on their role in the formation of modern institutions.

  • Bio Item
    James Collier , bio

    Lane Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061, jcollie@vt.edu

  • Bio Item
    Matthew R. Goodrum , bio

    Matthew Goodrum's research focuses on the history of paleoanthropology and theories of human origins. He investigate the relationships between the natural sciences, such as geology and biology, and human sciences such as anthropology and archaeology.

  • Bio Item
    Monamie Bhadra Haines , bio

    Monamie Bhadra Haines’s internationally comparative work examines technopolitics, activism and how they might illuminate the workings of nonliberal democracy in the areas of energy transitions and pandemic management in the so-called Global South. She also pursues comparative research on pedagogical practices in European engineering education.

  • Bio Item
    Saul Halfon , bio

    Saul Halfon works in the political sociology of science and technology, with a focus on the technical and sense-making practices of policy institutions, conceptions and mechanisms of public engagement, and practices of interdisciplinarity. His primary research emphasizes controversial science and technology issues, and the relations between authoritative and silenced voices in such disputes, leading to projects on international population policy, international GM food controversies, controversies over depleted uranium, and discursive practices in security and development policies. His current project focuses on the regulation of food risk and danger at the USDA.

  • Bio Item
    Rebecca J. Hester , bio

    Rebecca Hester's research examines the social, political, and scientific implications of preempting, preventing, and eradicating "biological danger." She is currently working on a book project that asks what and who constitutes biological danger in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The answer she comes up with has less to do with commonly identified threats-viruses, laboratory leaks, and spillover events- and more to do with the "pathogenic entanglements" between our scientific understandings of infectious disease, inflammatory environments, and long-standing social inequities.

  • Bio Item
    Cora Olson , bio

    Cora Olson's research has two key strands: the intertwined construction of biomedical knowledge and morality and critical STS pedagogical practices. She is currently in the process of transitioning out of COVID related research back into sports related research within the first strand. In the second strand, she is working on projects related to how critical STS is practiced at Virginia Tech.

  • Bio Item
    Christine Labuski , bio

    Christine Labuski's research and teaching are organized around two primary areas of inquiry: sexualities and how sexualities become medicalized, and; gender and climate/environmental justice, with an emphasis on feminist energy systems, queer ecologies, and the gender politics of fossil fuel boomtowns.

  • Bio Item
    Philip R. Olson , bio

    Philip Olsen's work engages with bioethics and body studies, death studies, women’s and gender studies, and social epistemology. He is currently working on writing projects related to public deathcare policy and the environment. He has worked with graduate students on a variety of topics, including death studies and material culture, cultural studies of diamonds, technology and religion, electronic medical records, cultural and political theory, healthcare ethics, epistemology, and several other topics.

  • Bio Item
    Fabian Prieto-Nañez , bio

    Fabian Prieto-Nañez's research and teaching focuses on the history of technologies in the Global South, particularly through the lens of media devices and infrastructures. His dissertation focused on ideas of piracy, informality and illegality in the use of early satellite dishes in the Caribbean, particularly in Colombia. He also had worked on histories of computing in Latin America.

  • Bio Item
    Fernanda R. Rosa , bio

    Fernanda R. Rosa is currently working on her second book project whose narrative builds a bridge between technical debates on internet interconnection infrastructure and social justice to examine internet governance and design from the standpoint of the global South. Using an original method defined as code ethnography, and a transdisciplinary lens founded on science and technologies studies, decolonial and feminist studies, the book sheds light on the information circulation infrastructure of the internet with a design justice and policy approach. It situates the reader in indigenous and Latin American contexts to problematize the inequalities in the access to internet infrastructure and the values embedded in information circulation infrastructure of the internet. Brazil, Germany, Mexico, and Tseltal and Zapoteco sovereign territories are the fieldwork sites of this study.

  • Bio Item
    Sonja D. Schmid , bio

    Sonja Schmid's research includes examining the interface of national energy policies, technological choices, and nonproliferation concerns. Her most recent NSF-supported research project examined the challenges of globalizing nuclear emergency response. She teaches courses in social studies of technology, science and technology policy, socio-cultural studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear nonproliferation.

  • Bio Item
    Ashley Shew , bio

    Ashley Shew participates in the STS PhD program, the Medicine & Society minor, the Disability Studies minor, the Bioethics graduate certificate, and Integrative Graduate Education Program on Regenerative Medicine as an associate professor. Her main areas of interest are philosophy of technology, emerging technologies, animal studies, bioethics and disability studies.

  • Bio Item
    Lee Vinsel , bio

    Lee Vinsel studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His current work focuses on the production of Peoples & Things, a podcast featuring interviews with the world’s leading figures in the empirical study of technology and society, and his book project, A Good History of $#%@ Jobs, which examines why so many households in the United States can barely make ends meet.

  • Bio Item
    Matthew Wisnioski , bio

    Matthew Wisnioski studies the interplay between expertise and imagination in science, technology, and innovation. Through historical and ethnographic research, his work has explored the relationship between engineering activism in the 1960s and broad transformations in the meaning of technology; how scientists, engineers, and designers collaborate; and how “innovation” came to shape American life over the 20th and 21st centuries. An advocate for transdisciplinary critical participation, he has collaborated in a multiyear initiative to reimagine and remake engineering education at Virginia Tech and developed innovative STS courses that aim to cultivate reflective practitioners. He is currently exploring the role of multimedia in the rise of “STEM” education via a history of The Magic School Bus.

  • Bio Item
    Joseph Pitt , bio

    237 Major Williams Hall, 220 Stanger Street, Blacksburg, VA 24061, 540-231-5760| jcpitt@vt.edu

Contributing Faculty

Name Position Office Phone Email

Mark Barrow

Professor, History

431 Major Williams Hall             

540-231-4099          

barrow@vt.edu 

Monique Dufour

Collegiate Assistant Professor, History

403 Major Williams Hall

540-231-8307        

msdufour@vt.edu

Richard Hirsh

Professor, History

423 Major Williams Hall

540-231-5601

richards@vt.edu

Timothy Luke

University Distinguished Professor, Political Science

539 Major Williams Hall

540-231-6633

twluke@vt.edu

David Tomblin

Program Director, Science, Technology, and Society, U Maryland, College Park

 

 

dtomblin@umd.edu

Name Position Office Phone Email

Nick Copeland

Associate Professor, History

428 Major Williams Hall

540-231-8839

ncopel@vt.edu

Cara Daggett

Associate Professor, Political Science

Major Williams Hall

 

energyshift@vt.edu

Maaz Gardezi

Assistant Professor, Sociology

518 McBryde Hall

540-231-2765

maaz@vt.edu

Liora Goldensher

Assistant Professor, Sociology

668 McBryde Hall

 

lodg@vt.edu

Mark L. Hineline

Independent Scholar

Flagstaff, Arizona

928-856-4641

mark.hineline@gmail.com

Sylvester Johnson 


Professor and Director of the Center for the Humanities


315 Lane Hall 


540-231-9120 


saj240@vt.edu


Melanie Kiechle

Associate Professor, History

417 Major Williams Hall

540-231-7523

mkiechle@vt.edu

Yanna Lambrinidou

Independent Scholar

 

 

yanna@vt.edu

Lisa McNair

Professor, Engineering Education

371 Goodwin Hall

540-231-1144

lmcnair@vt.edu

Patrick Roberts

Associate Professor

 

202-599-0562

robertsp@vt.edu

Lydia Patton

Professor, Philosophy

231 Major Williams Hall

540-231-8489

critique@vt.edu

Kelly Pender

Professor and Department Chair, English

306 Shanks Hall

540-231-9077

pender@vt.edu

Thomas Staley

Associate Professor

445 Old Turner Street

540-231-7522

tstaley@vt.edu

Robert P. Stephens

Associate Professor

439 Major Williams Hall 

540-231-8371

rosteph2@vt.edu

Daniel Sui

VP for Research and Innovation

340 Burruss Hall

540-231-6077

dsui20@vt.edu

Tyechia Thompson

Assistant Professor, English

212 Shanks Hall

 

tyechia@vt.edu

Paroma Wagle

Assistant Professor, Urban Affairs and Planning

201 Architecture Annex

 

paroma@vt.edu

Anna Zeide

Associate Professor, History

429 Major Williams Hall

 

zeide@vt.edu

Qin Zhu

Associate Professor, Engineering Education

354 Goodwin Hall

 

qinzhu@vt.edu

                

Name Position Office Phone Email

Ann La Berge

Associate Professor Emerita

 

 

 alaberge@vt.edu

Richard Burian

Professor Emeritus

 

 

rmburian@vt.edu

Eileen Crist

Associate Professor Emerita

 

 

ecrist@vt.edu

Gary Downey

Alumni Distinguished Professor

 

 

downeyg@vt.edu

Ellsworth Fuhrman

Professor

 

 

fuhrman@vt.edu

Joseph Pitt

Professor, Philosophy

237 Major Williams 

540-231-5760

jcpitt@vt.edu

Doris Zallen

Professor

 

 

dtzallen@vt.edu

Staff

Name Position Office Phone Email

Cynthia Peecher

Budget Manager

123 Lane Hall           

540-231-5016   

cpeecher@vt.edu

Sarah Harvey

Graduate/Undergraduate Coodinator

121 Lane Hall

540-231-0719  

saharvey1@vt.edu

Ashley Snider

Office Manager

122 Lane Hall

540-231-7615

aktate@vt.edu

Blake Smith

IT Manager

323 Lane Hall

 

bsmith15@vt.edu