We are pleased to introduce the guest interviews you will hear in Duck and Cover. Our guests are an impressive line-up of scholars and professionals, many who are experts of civil defense and nuclear history.
Peter Bennesved
Umea University, Sweden
@bennesved
Peter Bennesved is a PhD student in the History of Science and Ideas at the Department of historical, philosophical and religious studies, Umeå University.
His forthcoming dissertation (est. 2019) concerns the introduction of Civil Defence Technologies in Sweden and tries to provide an answer to how Sweden managed to produce an enormous Civil Defence apparatus and security infrastructure over the course of the twentieth-century. His main focus is the introduction of Air-Raid Shelters during the Inter-war- and Second World War period and how that period shaped Civil Defence in the coming Cold War decades. Setting forth from a STS- and material history perspective, Bennesved’s research asks how military intellectuals, politicians, engineers and entrepreneurs, as well as ordinary city dwellers understood and handled Civil Defence and the “Shelter Issue.” This proposed method set outs to explain how ideas from different interest groups facilitated a public and political domestication of civil defence technologies in the urban fabric, that eventually helped underpin a long-lasting institutionalization of shelters and other Civil Defence technologies.
Garrett Graff
Journalist and Historian
@vermontgmg
Garrett M. Graff, a distinguished magazine journalist, bestselling historian, and regular TV commentator has spent more than a dozen years covering politics, technology, and national security.
Today, he serves as the director of the Aspen Institute’s cybersecurity and technology program, and is a contributor to WIRED, Longreads, and CNN. He’s written for publications from Esquire to the New York Times, and served as the editor of two of Washington’s most prestigious magazines, Washingtonian and POLITICO Magazine, which he helped lead to its first National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor.
Graff is the author of multiple books, including The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, which examined the role of technology in the 2008 presidential race, and The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI, which traces the history of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts. He taught at Georgetown University for seven years, including courses on journalism and technology, and is the chair of the board of the National Conference on Citizenship, a congressionally-charted civic engagement group founded by Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
Matthew Grant
University of Essex
@mgrnt
Professor Grant’s research covers the history of Britain since 1939, focusing on the cultural and political impact of war and conflict on the home front.
Matthew Grant studied history at Queen Mary, University of London, receiving his Ph.D. in 2006. After, he spent five years total teaching at the University of Sheffield and Teesside University, and worked one year as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manchester. Professor Grant joined the History Department at the University of Essex in September 2013. Professor Grant has written on cold war civil defense and security, the cultural impact of nuclear weapons, and murder in 1940s Britain.
Professor Grant is currently working on a new book charting the impact of the Cold War on concepts and experiences of citizenship, The Cold War and the Remaking of British Citizenship. Along with Dr. Peter Gurney, Professor Grant is also conducting an oral history project on the experience of National Service in postwar Britain funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In addition to this research, Grant has recently co-published an edited collection, with Professor Benjamin Ziemann of the University of Sheffield, on international responses to nuclear conflict, Understanding the Imaginary War (Manchester University Press, 2016).
Laura McEnaney
Whittier College, California
Professor Laura McEnaney started teaching at Whittier College in 1996, after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that same year. She teaches U.S. history, specializing in the post-1945 era.
Her teaching interests include the immediate post-World War II era and Cold War, women and gender, war and society, and modern social movements. Her recent book, Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) looks at World War II’s aftermath in the United States, when the shelling was over, but the peace was still ill-defined. McEnaney has won a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend, a fellowship from Brown University’s George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and an Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities (American Council of Learned Societies). She is also an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She is currently the Vice President of the Teaching Division of the American Historical Association, and a member of the Nominating Committee for the Organization of American Historians.
Sonja Schmid
Virginia Tech University
Professor Schmid’s work has changed the way we think and plan for responding to nuclear emergencies around the world.
Sonja Schmid got her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Cornell University, and teaches courses in social studies of technology, science and technology policy, socio-cultural studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear nonproliferation. For her first book, she studied the history and organization of the emerging Soviet nuclear industry, and has traced the results of Soviet nuclear technology transfer to Central and East European nations that have since joined the European Union. She is particularly interested in examining the interface of national energy policies, technological choices, and nonproliferation concerns. She is the co-director of the STS Graduate Program in Northern Virginia, and serves on the stakeholder committee for the university’s Strategic Growth Area “Policy.”
Alex Wellerstein
Stevens Institute of Technology,
@wellerstein
Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science who specializes in the history of nuclear weapons.
He earned his undergraduate History degree from Berkeley and his Ph.D. in History from Harvard in 2010. He is now an assistant professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and David and GG Farber Fellow in Science and Technology Studies. Currently, he is working with the University of Chicago Press to complete a book on the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States from the Manhattan Project to the present (forthcoming 2020). Professor Wellerstein has published numerous articles for both academic and general audiences, most of which have been on the history of nuclear weapons. His work has been cited in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the History Channel, Fox News, and even The Daily Show, among other venues. Professor Wellerstein also authors a blog, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, and is the creator of the NUKEMAP, a popular nuclear weapons effects simulator.
Duck and Cover Podcast
D&C Pod was written, organized, and produced in 2019 by our co-hosts and a small group of staff.
Do you have more questions about civil defense or Duck and Cover? Get in touch with us through social media or email!
The Duck and Cover Podcast 