Janet Abbate

Assistant professor in the department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. She holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard-Radcliffe and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Inventing the Internet (MIT Press, 1999) and numerous articles on the history of the Internet. As a Research Associate with the Information Infrastructure Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she coedited (with Brian Kahin) the volume Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure (MIT Press, 1995). Other publications include “Privatizing the Internet: Competing Visions and Chaotic Events, 1987-1995” (Annals of the History of Computing, forthcoming); “Women and Gender in the History of Computing” (Annals of the History of Computing, 2003); “Computer Networks” (in Atsushi Akera and Frederik Nebeker, eds., From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing, Oxford, 2002); and “Government, Business, and the Making of the Internet” (Business History Review, Harvard, 2001). Her current research focuses on women’s professional identities as programmers and computer scientists in the US and Britain since the World War II.