Lecture and Colloquium

On May 9-10, UD will welcome Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, author A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018), for a public lecture “A History of Computing Citizenship” and a colloquium “The Pipeline Fallacy: My Work as a Woman around STEM.” Dr. Rankin’s path-breaking book overturns the prevailing narratives about the history of computers that focus on a handful of heroic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Instead, her work takes a bottom-up approach, exploring the ways that ordinary Americans—boys and girls, men and women—shaped hardware and software development in the years before the rise of the PC in the 1980s. A reviewer for The Nation called the book “a powerful and densely detailed account of how digital culture in the 1960s and ’70s shaped our contemporary experiences of technology as a tool for social connection.” 

In her lecture, Dr. Rankin will explore the relationship between community and citizenship in the formative years of networked computing. In her colloquium, she will discuss the resistance she faced when excavating the sometimes-troubling gender dynamics in the software development communities and the consequences this resistance had for her professional career.  

Dr. Rankin’s visit has been arranged by the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture, with co-sponsorship by UD’s ADVANCE Institute, which promotes women in STEM, and the departments of history, women and gender studies, electrical and computer engineering, and computer and information sciences. Hagley Program coordinator David Suisman said, “We are excited about Dr. Rankin’s upcoming visit. She is a highly original scholar whose work brings together many important issues. Plus, her visit was a chance to enhance the connections between the humanities and STEM at UD.”

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