Kristen Haring

Kristen Haring is a historian of science and technology. Her current work focuses on communication technologies, with particular attention to questions concerning identity, culture, and design. She is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Columbia University.

Kristen earned a PhD in History of Science at Harvard University; an MS in Mathematics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and a BA, magna cum laude, in Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. She held research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; the Gallery of Research, Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna; and the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and the National Museum of American History, both units of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.

Her article, “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance,” in Technology and Culture, won the IEEE Life Members’ Prize in Electrical History from the Society for the History of Technology for the best paper in electrical history published during 2003.

Kristen is a founding director of the Keith Haring Foundation. The Foundation raises awareness of the late artist’s work and provides grants – totaling more than US$3 million since 1989 – to organizations that benefit disadvantaged children and people with HIV/AIDS.

During her fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude (in residence for summer 2005 and 2006), Kristen completed her book, Ham Radio’s Technical Culture (MIT Press, Inside Technology series, 2006), and developed a method to incorporate texts into textiles by translating between the binary systems of Morse code and knitting. The knit Morse code work will be exhibited at the Akademie in fall 2007.