Ken Alder

Ken Alder (born April 14, 1959 ) is an American historian .

Life

Alder studied at Harvard University , where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1981 and a Ph.D. in 1991. in history of science . After completing his doctorate , he began teaching at Northwestern University , from 1991 to 1997 as Assistant Professor of History, from 1997 to 2003 as Associate Professor of History and since 2003 as Professor of History. At the same time, he has been Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities since 2003 . He was previously Harold and Virginia Anderson Outstanding Teaching Professor from 1999 to 2003 . He has also been chairman of the university's Department of History since 2014 .

In addition to teaching at Northwestern University, he was a visiting scholar at the Center de Sociologie de l'Innovation of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris in Paris from 1999 to 2000 , and at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago from 2001 to 2002 . From 2010 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2014 he was a visiting scholar at the Department of History at New York University . In 2012 he was a visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 2015 he was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin-Dahlem .

His book Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. received the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology in 1998 . His book The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World received the 2003 Dingle Prize of the British Society for the History of Science , as well as the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society and was one of two winners of the Historical Society's Kagan Prize in 2004 . It deals with the measurement of the meridian and the determination of the meter by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain at the time of the French Revolution.

In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences . Alder is a member of the History of Science Society , the Society for the History of Technology, and the American Historical Association , among others . In addition to his academic work, he published a youth novel, The White Bus: A Novel , in 1987 .

Publications (selection)

Non-fiction

• Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. (1997, Princeton: Princeton University Press )
• The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World. (2002, New York: The Free Press) (German: The measure of the world: the search for the original meter . Munich: C. Bertelsmann 2003. ISBN 3570005453. )
• The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession. (2007, New York: The Free Press)

Novels

• The White Bus: A Novel. (1987, New York: St. Martin's Press)

Web links

• Curriculum Vitae on the Northwestern University Department of History website