Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
Austerity Politics and the End of Cold War Science
Speaker
- Julia Menzel, Kenneth O. May Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
After World War II, scientists in the United States entered into new relations with the state and military that redefined how knowledge would be produced and to what ends. Over the last forty years, scholars in STS and the history of science have developed sophisticated accounts of how national defense priorities, novel forms of patronage and organization, and practices drawn from wartime contexts shaped the aims and epistemologies of “Cold War science.” This talk examines the breakdown of the postwar settlement between scientists and the US federal government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, locating this rupture within a broader crisis of Cold War liberalism and the rise of austerity politics. Focusing on the changing fortunes of American physicists, it begins by examining social-scientific audits of federal research programs that weaponized economic notions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness to question the logic of state support for “basic” research. It then shows how “big science” projects became targets of fiscal discipline under the Nixon administration, reconstructing funding struggles between top science advisors and officials in the new Office of Management and Budget who took an axe to physics as part of a program of austerity aligned with emerging neoliberal ideologies. The talk then details the severe and rapid “downsizing” of the US high-energy physics program between 1968 and 1976, which ended American dominance in a field formerly identified with national security. In closing, it reflects on continuities between the conflicts of the 1970s and the Trump administration’s recent cuts to the NSF, NIH, and other agencies.
Bio
Julia Menzel is the Kenneth O. May Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her research examines transformations in the practices, institutions, and epistemology of the physical and computational sciences since World War II and their connection to broader changes in American capitalism and politics. She completed her PhD in 2025 in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) at MIT, where she wrote a dissertation about theoretical physics during the transition from a Cold War to a neoliberal social order in the United States. She has an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates-Cambridge Scholar, and a BS in Physics from Yale University. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and a number of other institutions.
This event is organized by the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School.