Hanna Rose Shell
Assistant professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
areas of expertise: history of media, arts, art in science
Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist is an assistant professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society.
Her recent films include Locomotion in Water (2005), about the history of chronophotographic practice in science, and Secondhand (Pepe) (2007), co-directed with CMS-alum Vanessa Bertozzi, an exploration of textile recycling, diaspora cultures and cross-cultural history which recently screened all over Haiti, and at MOMA.
Shell’s multimedia installations, based on her camouflage work, have been exhibited in Boston and Los Angeles. Her latest film BLIND is in final post-production.
Shell received an MA in American Studies from Yale University in 2002, and a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard in 2007. For her PhD, she focused on the history of camouflage in the 19th and 20th centuries, at the intersection of the histories of biology, military strategy, technology and film media practice. She was elected as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2007, where she was in residence in 2008-2009, and will return in 2010-2011.
Shell’s book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance, will appear from Zone Books in Spring 2010. 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.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu