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Marie Hicks Lecture on Nov. 12

The CTSDH will host a lecture by historian Marie Hicks (IIT), Thursday Nov. 12, 3:00-5:00 PM, 318 Loyola Hall, Lake Shore Campus: "Women Computer Operators' Effects on the British State: A History of Gender and Digital Labor." Co-sponsored by Loyola's Women Studies and Gender Studies program. Free and open to the public.

Hicks is a historian of technology, gender, and modern Europe, specializing in the history of computing. Her recent work focuses on labor and technological change in Britain, and on investigating how 20th century efforts to computerize changed gendered and classed expectations associated with machine work. Her work studies how collective understandings of social progress are defined by competing discourses of national prestige, labor, and productivity, and how technologies play a formative role in this process. She is currently completing a book, Compiling Inequalities: Gender, Technocracy, and the Computerization of Britain, 1930-1979, that investigates how the falling percentage of women computer operators and programmers injured efforts to computerize British government and industry, and ultimately hindered that nation's global political and technological aspirations.