Please join us in welcoming Holtz Center scholar, Daniel Williford to the UW-Madison campus this semester. In addition to his science and technology studies interests, Daniel’s research interests include the history of disaster, infrastructures and the environment, the politics of expertise, financial technologies and the prehistory of neoliberalism, and practices of repair, demolition, and maintenance. This new Assistant Professor teaches courses in the history of technology, environmental history, and the history of the modern Middle East and North America.
Daniel recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is starting as a member of the UW Department of History faculty this fall. He has received several funding opportunities from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.
This historian of technology, focuses on twentieth-century North Africa and the Middle East. His work examines the links between colonial modernization projects, the construction of racialized technical hierarchies, local forms of political contestation and technological labor, and the remaking of urban environments in the region.
He has been working on his new book, which includes a history of colonial construction technologies and their postcolonial afterlives in Morocco. The theme revolves around the history of building with concrete and its place at the center of colonial and nationalist projects for modernizing the country’s urban environments.
You can catch his lunch time seminar with the Holtz Center next semester, on April 22. Daniel will presenting an exciting topic related to this theme and science and technology studies.
