Hanna Rose Shell
Assistant Professor (STS)
Hanna Rose Shell is a historian of science and media, and a filmmaker.
Shell received a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard in 2007 and an M.A. in American Studies from Yale University in 2002. She completed her A.B. at Harvard College (History and Science). She was elected as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2007, where she was in residence in 2008-2009. Shell’s book based on her doctoral work Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance, will appear from Zone Books. Shell edited a reprint of W.T. Hornaday’s Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Press, 2002 [1889]), and has published widely on natural history preservation and display practices, the history of ecology, experimental film history, and renaissance history of geology and art.
Her recent films include Locomotion in Water (2005), about the history of chronophotographic practice in science, and and Secondhand (Pepe):
Lives and Afterlives of the Social Fabric (2007), an exploration of textile recycling, diaspora cultures and cross-cultural history.
In 2009-2010, she is teaching "The Rise of Modern Science" (STS 003, Fall, with David Kaiser), "Science and the Cinema: Experiments on Film" (STS 056, Spring) and "Writing Seminar in Science and Technology Studies" (STS 390, Spring). Shell is affiliated with the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program at MIT.
