About Whitney Laemmli
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Whitney Laemmli (CBA ’22) is a historian of science and technology and Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. Her scholarship focuses on the scientific and technological construction of the human body in the modern United States and Europe, and her work has appeared in Technology and Culture, History of the Human Sciences, Osiris, and Information and Culture. Laemmli received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and, prior to arriving at Carnegie Mellon, she was a member of the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Laemmli received the 2018 Abbott Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.
During her CBA fellowship, Laemmli focused on her current book project. Titled Measured Movements, the book is a history of how and why human bodily movement became a central object of scientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century. The project uses Labanotation to uncover how human movement came to be documented and rationalized in new ways, in service of a vision of modernity in which expression and control, pleasure and productivity, were no longer in conflict.
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