Dean Deborah K. Fitzgerald is Professor of the History of Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She is very active in the Society for the History of Technology and is immediate past president of the Agricultural History Society.
She has chaired the School's Gender Equity Committee and has been involved with a variety of Institute-wide committees, including those on academic performance, discipline, and graduate school policy. As a member of the Task Force on the Educational Commons, she chaired the subcommittee that developed the recommendations for changes to the HASS requirement that appeared in the task force's recent report.
A leading historian of American agriculture, she is the author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, which won the Theodore Saloutos Prize for best book of the year in 2003. She is also the author of The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890-1940.
Educated at Iowa State University and the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Fitzgerald was on the history of science faculty at Harvard University before coming to MIT in 1988. From 1996 to 2001, she chaired the PhD program in history, anthropology, and science, technology and society, which is administered by the Program in Science, Technology, and Society jointly with the History Faculty and the Anthropology Program. Before her appointment as Kenan Sahin Dean, she had served as associate dean of SHASS since April 2005.