Pamela O. Long

Pamela O. Long

Fellow: Awarded 2007
Field of Study: History of Science and Technology

Competition: US & Canada

Pamela O. Long is an independent historian who studies late medieval and Renaissance European history and the history of science and technology. Her focus has been craft and practical traditions and their relationships to traditions of learning.  She is codirector (with David McGee and Alan M. Stahl [Guggenheim Fellow, 2008]) of the Michael of Rhodes project, the creation of a three-volume facsimile edition of a book written by a fifteenth-century oarsman who worked on Venetian galleys between 1401 and 1445.  The book contains the first extant treatise on shipbuilding, a treatise on methematics, and Michael’s autobiography.  It has been published by MIT Press in 2009.  For more information on that project, see Ms. Long’s website.

Her publications include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance  (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001; rpt., 2004), winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in intellectual history published in 2001; and "The Openness of Knowledge: An Idea and its Context in 16th-Century Writings on Mining and Metallurgy," Technology and Culture, 32 (April 1991): 864-884, winner of the 1993 Abbot Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). She is coeditor of the series Historical Perspectives in Technology, Society, and Culture, published by SHOT and the American Historical Association (see http://www.historyoftechnology.org/booklets_intro.html).

Ms. Long is currently working on a cultural history of engineering in the city of Rome between 1560 and 1590. 

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