Dr. Slava Gerovitch

Slava Gerovitch is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds two doctorates in the history and social study of science and technology from the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992) and from MIT (1999). His research interests include the history of Soviet science and technology during the Cold War, especially computing, cybernetics, and astronautics. His book, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002), has received an honorable mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for an outstanding monograph in Russian, Eurasian, or East European studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. His articles have appeared in the journals Technology and Culture, Social Studies of Science, Science in Context, and The Russian Review and in the collections Science and Ideology, Cultures of Control, Universities and Empire, and Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight. His most recent article is “‘New Soviet Man’ Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism,” OSIRIS, vol. 22 (2007). He is the recipient of the 2007-2008 Fellowship in Aerospace History from the American Historical Association. Currently he is working on two research projects: the history of Soviet efforts to build a nationwide computerized economic management system and the history of onboard computing in the Soviet space program.