[HASTS-jobs] Fwd: Tenure-Track STS Position: Stevens Institute of Technology

[Karen L Gardner]

Begin forwarded message:
From: William P Deringer <deringer at mit.edu<mailto:deringer at mit.edu>>
Subject: [HASTS-fac] Tenure-Track STS Position: Stevens Institute of Technology
Date: December 2, 2016 at 5:53:40 PM EST
To: hasts-students <hasts-students at mit.edu<mailto:hasts-students at mit.edu>>, hasts-fac <hasts-fac at mit.edu<mailto:hasts-fac at mit.edu>>

Dear HASTS community,

For any students on the job market, Stevens Institute of Technology is hiring a tenure-track position in history of science/STS. The official announcement is here:

https://stevens.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Hoboken-NJ---Main-Campus/Tenure-Track-Assistant-Professor-of-Science---Technology-Studies_RQ18236

The search chair, nuclear-historian-and-public-STS-scholar-extraordinaire Alex Wellerstein, posted some detailed and thoughtful notes on the search to Facebook, giving some insight into Stevens and the position. They should be really helpful to anyone interested in the position, so I wanted to forward them along.

Cheers,
Will

*****

From Alex Wellerstein:



Historians of science/STS people, please circulate:

I'm excited to be able to announce that we have a tenure track history of science/STS job opportunity here at the Stevens Institute of Technology. I am the search chair, and anyone should feel free to get in touch with questions.

You can read the official solicitation below, I also wanted to just circulate some informal notes on it (because our circumstances are perhaps not externally obvious) in the interest of getting strong, interesting applications:

- Stevens is in Hoboken, NJ, which is just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and has a population of some 50,000 people crammed into one square mile, making it the city with the 4th-highest population density in the USA (it is about half the density of Manhattan). It is part of the NYC metro area, a transportation hub for both NY and NJ, and it is easier to get to Manhattan from Hoboken than it is to get there from many of the other boroughs. I just want to clarify this since a lot of people (including myself, before I had been to Stevens for the first time) are not clear on where Hoboken is.

- The job is assistant professorship in the Program on STS. We do not really have "departments" here at Stevens — our College of Arts and Letters has only about 45 faculty total spread between all different disciplines, and each program is clustered around a handful of similarly-affiliated scholars. This makes us pretty inherently interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. So an application for this job should probably be pitched not in the way one would apply to a dedicated STS or history of science department, or even a dedicated history department; overlapping and expansive research interests are a good thing here. So is evidence (or plausible interest) of collaboration with scholars from different disciplines, including the natural sciences and engineering, is a positive thing. Collaboration in general is highly valued around here, even by junior scholars.

- Stevens is a relatively small (2,500 undergrads or so, but growing) engineering school. What counts as "engineering" has expanded over the years (e.g., biological engineering, chemical engineering, business technology), but it is very much a technical place at its core. The College of Arts and Letters explicitly sees itself as a place that both sits at the intersections of humanities and technology (and so most of its programs are, like STS, very explicitly about that intersection — two other prominent programs here are Music Engineering and Visual Arts and Technology, both of which are very explicitly tech slants to the arts, even while they both also foster traditional artistic skills as well).

- The undergraduates are almost all students of a technical bent, and while there are a growing number of dedicated CAL majors (including STS majors and minors), even these people are pretty self-selected and of a techie disposition. So it is a very different sort of teaching and working environment than a liberal arts school or even an R1 with a larger self-sufficient humanities component.

- The job listing is deliberately agnostic about research specialization. Historical in method or approach is the main gist of it. But the actual degree discipline can vary a bit (within reason). We have some teaching needs, which are noted (it would be a very strong thing if one could plausibly claim to teach a course on the history of pre-modern and/or early modern science), but even this might take a back seat to other compelling attributes (e.g., fitting other teaching needs). An applicant that can make a good case for fitting into our structure and needs here but didn't exactly meet that particular teaching requirement should not be discouraged from applying. We are not, however, a teaching college — research matters.

- We especially encourage applications by people who have digital components to their scholarship, people who could imagine collaborating on data-driven projects, people who could imagine collaborating with our programs in music and art, and people who could imagine collaborating with our social and behavioral scientists. Again, we are a relatively small crew here, but we are interested in leveraging that smallness to produce interesting kinds of hybrid research activity. This is a place where junior scholars are encouraged to do unusual, non-standard, risk-taking work.

- We have tried to make the application as streamlined and simple as possible (a CV, a cover letter, a letter of teaching philosophy, and a few references) at this stage to expedite the process (even though this is getting posted late in the season). We hope for the process to move quickly as possible. We will start reviewing applications on January 10, 2017, and continue until the position is filled.



William Deringer
Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor
Program in Science, Technology, and Society<http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/Deringer.html> | MIT
77 Massachusetts Ave, E51-188 | Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-9651 | deringer at mit.edu<mailto:deringer at mit.edu>

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