Fourth year HASTS PhD candidate Turner Adornetto and recent program graduate Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25 jointly convened a panel and presented papers at the 2026 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The conference took place in Kansas City, MO between March 25 and 28.
Turner’s and Boyd’s panel was entitled “Technological Environmentalisms: Histories of Environmentalist Technologies and Infrastructures.” In addition to their own presentations on alternative energy infrastructures and biodegradable materials, respectively, the panel featured work by Genevieve Kane of Boston University. Sarah Mittlefehldt, of Northern Michigan University, served as the panel’s chair and discussant.
Fourth year HASTS PhD candidate Turner Adornetto has received a $5000 research grant from the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. The grants program is a component of a Center initiative called “Visualizing Economic Life.”
With the award money, Turner will embark upon the production of a short documentary film about the phenomenon of company-issued currency in West Virginia. He is currently living and working in that area as he completes field- and archival work for his HASTS dissertation project, tentatively titled “Infrastructures of Renewal: Competing Designs for Redevelopment in Central Appalachia.”
Congratulations, Turner!
Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25 received an honorable mention for the 2026 Edward M Coffman First Manuscript Prize, an award from the Society for Military History for best dissertation in that field. The Society notes that the Coffman Prize recognizes “scholars whose work blends military history with social, political, economic and diplomatic history and authors of studies centering on campaigns, leaders, technology, and doctrine.”
Ruamcharoen presented his HASTS dissertation, entitled “Deteriorating Relations: Weatherable Materials, Tropical Decay, and American Power, 1942-1970s,” in summer 2025. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.
Congratulations, Boyd!
During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) this past January, third year HASTS student Odinaka Kingsley Eze offered a workshop series entitled “Design through Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism.” A collaboration with Eze’s colleague Sheila Bombaar (University of Texas, Austin), the hybrid activity exposed MIT undergraduates to how Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism can serve as design frameworks for creativity and speculative imagination in the 21st century. MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society sponsored the initiative.
From January 14th to 16th, Eze and Bombaar guided students through a series of exercises that allowed them to develop conceptual projects, prototypes, and visual ideas that fused historical imagination with future-oriented design. In doing so, the instructors encouraged participants to incorporate principles of pan-African solidarity and Afro-futuristic systems of knowledge— such as oral traditions, folklore, poetry, and African cosmologies— into their work. The result was a series of projects that proposed to re-invigorate creative industries spanning from game design to fashion by suffusing them with these frameworks.
First year HASTS student Jorge Palacios, a mixed-media scholar-artist who holds an MFA in environmental art and practice from the University of California, Santa Cruz, is featured in two upcoming gallery exhibitions taking place in Chattanooga, TN and Kansas City, MO, respectively.
From January 31st to March 7th, Jorge’s work will be on display at the 100,000,000 Gallery in an exhibition entitled “Bone Snack.” According to the curators, the artwork featured in the Kanas City-based exhibition represents “intensity and narrative in both concept and process.” Jorge’s submission was one of 36 selected from a pool of 140 artists.
From February 27th to June 6th, meanwhile, Jorge’s artwork will be on display at Stove Works in Chattanooga. The curators of that exhibition, entitled “Paradise,” write that the artworks featured challenge normative ideas about the future, offering “a queer reading of paradise that presents the idyllic as an endless possibility.”
To learn more about Jorge’s artistic practice, visit their website at jorgx.com.
Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25 has been awarded the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Bernard S Finn IEEE History Prize. Given annually to the best paper in the history of electrotechnology, the prize recognizes Ruamcharoen’s article “Tropicalizing the Portable Radio: Electronics and the US Military’s Battle against Fungi in the Pacific War.” The article appeared in the April 2024 issue of Technology and Culture.
Ruamcharoen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. The HASTS community congratulates him on this wonderful achievement.
Third year HASTS student Odinaka Eze has been awarded a MIT Bevans Artistic Exploration Fund grant. Established in 2024 by Keith (SB ’95) and Natasha Bevans, the $5,000 grant sponsors artistic projects that explore and illuminate Black experience and culture.
With support from the Bevans Fund, Odinaka will produce a historical documentary on Garuba Garuba, an activist and leprosy patient during Nigerian independence. The project will add a mixed-media component to Odinaka’s HASTS dissertation research on related themes.
On January 25, 2026, the Board of Trustees of Columbia University announced that it has designated HASTS alumna Jennifer L Mnookin PhD ’99 as the University’s 21st president.
Mnookin, who presently serves as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, is a scholar of technology and the law. She was previously Dean of the School of Law and Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. During her graduate studies at MIT, Mnookin wrote a dissertation entitled “Images of Truth: Evidence, Expertise and Technologies of Knowledge in the American Courtroom” under the tutelage of Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus Michael M.J. Fischer.
Mnookin will begin her appointment as Columbia’s next leader on July 1. The HASTS community extends her the warmest congratulations as she prepares to assume the new post.
Following the successful launch of Contrasts magazine in autumn 2025, the editorial team has announced a call for pitches for Issue 02 on the theme of “fortunes.”
For Issue 02, the team invites submissions that explore the vast and (un)predictable realms of “fortunes.” Whether they’re tucked into cookies, ranked by the dollar on lists of 500, tempted, or chased, fortunes are slippery, contentious things that shape how we choose, desire, imagine, and forge connections with worlds seen and unseen. Fortunes prompt us to critically examine how science and technology shape the ways we sense, influence, predict, and contend with the future.
Pitches are due via this form by 11:59:59 ET on Monday, February 23, 2026. The editors invite submissions from emerging scholars both within academia (from undergrads through early career scholars) and without (including artists and designers).You can read more about the theme, the types of features they welcome, and how to pitch your submission, at contrastsmag.net.
About the magazine:
Contrasts is an online magazine featuring works that can speak to a broad audience about the intersections of science, technology, and society. Through multiple genres—including creative nonfiction, visual essays, and short films—Contrasts aims to foster critical reflection on STEM projects by making visible the politics and social contexts of science, technology, and medicine.
Contrasts is sponsored by the doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society at MIT and edited by its graduate students.