Pinch, Trevor (John) 1952-

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PINCH, Trevor (John) 1952-

PERSONAL: Born January 1, 1952, in Lisnaskea, Northern Ireland; son of Owain Fey Trevor (a teacher) and Joan Elizabeth (a teacher; maiden name, Eccles) Pinch; married Christine Asako Leuenberger (a professor), January, 1992; children: two, including Benika. Education: Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, B.Sc., 1973; Victoria University of Manchester, M.Sc., 1976; University of Bath, Ph. D., 1982.

ADDRESSES: Home—112 Crest Lane, Ithaca, NY 14850. Office—Department of Science and Technology Studies, 632 Clark Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Bath, Bath, England, research officer in humanities and social sciences, 1975-77, research fellow, 1980-82; University of York, York, England, lecturer in sociology, 1983-90, assistant director of Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, 1987-90; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, associate professor, beginning 1990, currently professor of science and technology studies and sociology and department chair. University of Twente, visiting research fellow, 1982-83; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Mullins Distinguished Lecturer, 1991; Cambridge University, visiting scholar, 1994-95.

MEMBER: Society for Social Studies of Science, History of Science Society, Society for the History of Technology, American Sociological Association, British Sociological Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Merton Prize, American Sociological Association, 1995; The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science was named book of the year by Emory and Henry College, 1995.

WRITINGS:

(With Harry M. Collins) Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1982.

Confronting Nature: The Sociology of Solar-Neutrino Detection, D. Reidel (Dordrecht, Netherlands), 1986.

(Editor, with Thomas P. Hughes and Wiebe E. Bijker) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

(With M. Ashmore and M. Mulkay) Health and Efficiency: A Sociology of Health Economics, Open University Press (Milton Keynes, England), 1989.

(Editor, with D. Gooding and S. Schaffer) The Uses of Experiment, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1989.

(Editor, with J. Hutton, S. Hutton, and A. Shiell, and contributor) Dependency to Enterprise, Routledge & Kegan Paul (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Harry M. Collins) The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994, 2nd edition, 1998.

(Editor, with S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, and J. Petersen) Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1994.

(With Colin Clark) The Hard Sell: The Language and Lessons of Street-Wise Marketing, HarperCollins (London, England), 1995.

(With Harry M. Collins) The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(With Frank Trocco) Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

(Editor, with Nelly Oudshoorn) How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technologies, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Structures and Actions, edited by N. Fielding, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1988; Responding to Large Technical Systems: Control or Anticipation, edited by Todd La Porte, Kluwer (Dordrecht, Netherlands), 1991; and Shaping Technology/Building Society, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992. Coeditor of the series "Inside Technology," MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), beginning 1987.

SIDELIGHTS: Trevor Pinch once told CA: "My writing career commenced when I was a physics student. I finished a science fantasy manuscript and hawked it around publishers in London's West End. Unfortunately, there was a major barrier to my career at this point—I couldn't write. The manuscript remains unpublished to this day.

"I gave up physics to become a social scientist to research the nature of science. My first book was on the impact of paranormal 'spoonbender' Uri Geller on the physics community. I have subsequently written and edited a number of works on the nature of science and technology. All such books are academic in nature. In all my academic writing, on whatever subject, I have tried to emphasize the fundamental human skills that underlie complex activities, such as scientific research, the production of a new technology, or the selling of goods. The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science and The Hard Sell, a book on market traders' selling skills, represent my first attempts to write for a popular audience.

"In 1990 I became a refugee from Thatcherite Britain and took up a new position at Cornell University. I have written a novel and a collection of short stories, thus far unpublished."