Faculty and Staff
Lillian Hoddeson
Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science
Professor Hoddeson specializes in the history of twentieth-century science and technology, including modern physics, elecronics, atomic weapons, “big science,” memory, and oral history. She is an author or editor of seven books and over 50 articles in the history of science or technology. Presently she is working on two book projects about large-scale research (big science), one on “megascience” at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the other on questions of scale in the discontinued Superconducting SuperCollider project. Her most recent books were on the history of the transistor (Crystal Fire: the Birth of the Information Age, 1997, with Michael Riordan) and the life of John Bardeen (True Genius: the Life and Science of John Bardeen, 2002, with Vicki Daitch). In 1999 Crystal Fire won the first Sally Hacker prize of the Society for the History of Technology for the best book on technology in the previous two years aimed at popular as well as academic audiences; True Genius was recognized as one of the best intellectual reads of 2002 by the Times Higher Education Supplement and was the “Silver Winner 2002 For Biography” in ForWard Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards.
Her other professional honors include: Fellow of the American Physical Society (in History of Physics, elected 1993); Fellow (in 1997-8) of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois; 2001 University of Illinois Liberal Arts and Science Faculty Fellow in a Second Discipline (cognitive psychology); 2000-2001 University of Illinois Liberal Arts and Sciences Alumni Scholar; and 2000 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Two major themes in Hoddeson's research have been solid-state physics and “big science.” Between 1975 and 1980, she explored the roots of industrial research and solid-state physics at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where the first transistor was developed. In 1980, as research director of the American section of the International Project on the History of Solid-State Physics, she organized the writing of the major historical volume, Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics, coedited by Hoddeson, Ernest Braun, Jürgen Teichmann, and Spencer Weart (1992). After that she embarked on two overlapping projects that resulted in Crystal Fire and True Genius. In the course of studying the history of the atomic bomb she helped found the Los Alamos archives and history program, and write, with coauthors, the first technical history of building the atomic bomb based on the full complement of classified as well as unclassified documents: Critical Assembly: a History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945 (1993). At Fermilab Hoddeson established a national archives and history program focused on particle accelerators and particle physics. With Laurie Brown and others she organized three international symposia on the history of particle physics, which resulted in three edited volumes, The Birth of Particle Physics (1983); Pions to Quarks (1989), and The Rise of the Standard Model (1997).
Another of Hoddeson’s current research interests is the nature of scientific creativity, a study that draws on her training in physics, her years of research in the history of science, and her much earlier research (in the 1960s) on how children learn science. In addition, her extensive use of oral history interviews as a research tool and her regular graduate seminar on this subject have brought her deeply into questions of individual and collective memory, a subject she is pursuing presently in collaboration with other historians, writers, psychologists and sociologists in the context of a faculty seminar (under the auspices of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities) and a new undergraduate course on memory that explores the analogy between the way humans construct memories and historians write histories.
To my ongoing program of research of the last twenty-five years on the history of twentieth-century science and technology (including the rise of particle physics and accelerators, solid-state physics, large laboratories, and atomic weapons) I have recently added two interdisciplinary studies of memory, one on memory and oral history and the other on memory and the construction of identity and culture.