[Sci-tech-public] November 28th STS Colloquium: Thomas Zeller, speaker

[Debbie Meinbresse]

Please join us next Monday, November 28th, for the STS colloquium:

Setting the Scene for Scenic Roads:
Parkways in the United States and Germany, 1930-1970

Thomas Zeller
University of Maryland, College Park
4:00 p.m., E51-095

This talk will explore the way roads have been 
redesigned for the automobile as parkways in the 
United States and Germany, what meanings they 
acquired, and how drivers and passengers 
experienced them. These roads constituted nature, 
prescribed a way of seeing it, and turned the 
scenic view into a visual commodity that could be 
consumed akin to other mass-produced artifacts. 
However, this was a contested process, in which 
civil engineers, landscape architects and the 
consumers of these roads and views­-car drivers 
and passsengers­-competed with each other over 
questions of expertise, meaning, and proper 
usage. The most prominent specimens of these 
roads were the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United 
States and the Deutsche Alpenstrasse in Germany.

Thomas Zeller is an assistant professor in the 
Department of History at the University of 
Maryland, where he holds a joint appointment with 
the A. James Clark School of Engineering. His 
research is located on the intersections of 
environmental history and the history of 
technology. He is the author of Strasse, Bahn, 
Panorama (Campus, 2002), a revised version of 
which is forthcoming as Driving Germany: The 
Landscape of the Autobahn, 1930-1965_with 
Berghahn Books in 2007. Zeller has coedited the 
volumes Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and 
Environmental History (Rutgers University Press, 
2005) and How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, 
Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Ohio 
University Press, December 2005). His current 
book-length research project, "Consuming 
Landscapes. The View from the Road in the United 
States and Germany, 1910-1990," has been 
supported by grants from the National Science 
Foundation and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.



Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390 
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