Matt works at the nexus of the history of science & technology, American cultural-intellectual history, engineering studies, and the values of design. His 2012 book Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America is the inaugural volume in a new MIT Press Engineering Studies series. It is both a cultural-intellectual history of dominant contemporary assumptions about technology and a synthetic account of the US engineering profession in the postwar era. He also has written on György Kepes, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the origins of the MIT Media Lab, and the collaborative intersections of engineers and artists. He is beginning a second book on the role of innovation discourses and design methods in the making of postwar technoscientific selves.

Matt received his bachelors degree in Materials Science & Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and his PhD in History from Princeton in 2005. He comes to Virginia Tech from a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches graduate seminars in Design Cultures, Normative Visions of Technology, Main Themes in the History of Science, and an Introduction to STS as well as undergraduate classes in the history of technology, material culture studies, and Engineering Cultures.

Publications in Science & Technology Studies

Book

2012 Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

2013 "Centerbeam: Art of the Environment" in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the 'Techno-Social' Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 189-226. forthcoming.

2013 "Interview: Otto Piene on CAVS and MIT" in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the 'Techno-Social' Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 775-798. forthcoming.

2009 "'Liberal Education Has Failed': Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America," Technology and Culture, Vol. 50:4, pp.753-782.

2003 "'Inside the System': Engineers, Scientists, and the Boundaries of Social Protest in the Long 1960s," History and Technology, Vol. 19:4, pp. 313-333.

Selected Reviews

2011 "Let's Be Fysikists Again," Science, Vol. 332:6037, pp. 1504-1505.

2011 "Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision," Technology and Culture, Vol. 52:4, pp.52-53.

Online Media and Video

2013 "Podcast for Engineers for Change" New Books in Science and Technology, and Society, February 26.

2013 "What Do Herbert Marcuse and Mark Zuckerberg have in common?" Los Angeles Times, February 20.

2013 "National Engineers Week: A Q&A with Matthew Wisnioski" The MIT Press Blog, February 20.

2013 "Engineers for Change," presentation for Virginia Tech's Visible Scholarship Initiative, January 29.

2012 "'Change or Die!': The History of the Innovator's Aphorism" The Atlantic, December 12.

2011 "Aesthetic Virtue in the Defense Institute," presentation for the Festival of Art, Science, and Technology in celebration of the 150th Anniversary of MIT, February 4.