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EDWARD TENNER
Author, Social Historian
New York City, USA
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Edward Tenner is an independent writer, speaker, and consultant on technology and culture.
His book “Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences” is an international bestseller.
His most recent book “Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology” was named one of Library Journal’s Best Scientific Books of 2003.
Edward Tenner is now a Senior Research Associate of the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History.
He has been a visiting researcher in the Princeton departments of Geosciences and English and at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.
In 1991 Edward Tenner received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was appointed a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he began a project on unintended consequences of technology that was published as “Why Things Bite Back.”
As a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1995-96, he turned to the history of human interactions with everyday objects, which has led to “Our Own Devices.”
After receiving the A.B. from Princeton, a Junior Fellowship of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Edward Tenner held teaching and research positions in Chicago and became science editor of Princeton University Press.
Among the works he sponsored were Richard Feynman's last scientific book, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter and The History and Geography of Human Genes by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, which began a new era of human genetics and received the 1994 R.R. Hawkins Award of the Professional and Scientific Division of the Association of American Publishers as the best scientific or professional book of the year.
Edward Tenner has contributed essays and reviews to many of the leading newspapers and magazines of the U.S. and the U.K.
He now writes mainly for U.S. News, the Wilson Quarterly, Technology Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, American Heritage of Invention and Technology, and Designer/Builder.
He is a member of the editorial board of Raritan Quarterly Review, a contributing editor of the Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Magazine, and a member of the advisory board of Knowledge, Technology and Policy.
