Evelynn Hammonds

Evelynn M. Hammonds, is an Associate Professor of the History of Science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M. I. T.). Professor Hammonds received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Spelman College, in 1976 and a Bachelor's of Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology also in 1976.  She earned a Master of Science in Physics from M. I. T. in 1980. with support from a Xerox Corporation Fellowship.  For the next five years she worked as a computer software consultant in the Boston area including a year as a software applications consultant on Project Athena, the undergraduate computer project at M. I. T..  In 1985 she entered the doctoral program in the History of Science at Harvard University and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1993 under the direction of Drs. Barbara G. Rosenkrantz and Everett Mendelsohn.  Her graduate work at Harvard was supported by the Minority Prize fellowship and a Ford Foundation Dissertation fellowship. 

She was Five College Minority Fellow (1989-1990) at the School of Natural Science, Hampshire College, and also Visiting Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Hampshire College (1990-1991).  Prof. Hammonds was co-organizer of  the 1994 Black Women in the Academy Conference held at M. I. T..  During the academic year 1994-95 she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her research is in the history of science, medicine and public health in the United States, and race and gender in science studies.

Selected Publications

The Logic of Difference:  A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States (forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press)

The Search For Perfect Control: A Social History of Diphtheria in New York City, 1880 - 1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Barbara Laslett, Sally G. Kohlstedt, Helen Longino, and Evelynn Hammonds, eds. Gender and Scientific Authority, (University of Chicago Press 1996)

"Science, Politics and the Art of Persuasion: Promoting the New Scientific Medicine in New York City" co-authored with Elizabeth Fee, in David Rosner, ed., Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994)

"Missing Persons: Black Women and AIDS," in Beverly Guy-Sheftall ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995)

"Conflicts and Tensions in the Feminist Study of Gender and Science" co-authored with Helen Longino, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. by E.F. Keller and M. Hirsch (New York: Routledge, 1990)