My thesis has the working title, “Machine Past, Machine Future: Technology in British Thought, c.1870-1914”, and is about understandings of machinery in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.
I am exploring the importance of temporality in Victorian and Edwardian thinking about machines and the role of disciplinarity in shaping the ways in which we think about technology today.
The thesis uses a wide range of sources from the period which relate to the processes of industrialisation, to the relations between science, technology and the State, to the impact of technology in the workplace, and to the cultural representation of machines and mechanisation.
The material I examine includes the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the writings of JA Hobson, HG Wells and GK Chesterton.
My PhD research is supported by an AHRC doctoral studentship.