Edward Tenner, an independent historian of technology and culture, is a Distinguished Scholar of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University History Department. In 2024–25 he was a visiting lecturer at Princeton, teaching a Freshman Seminar, “Understanding Disasters.” He also has held visiting research positions in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Princeton departments and programs of Geosciences, English, Information Technology Policy, and Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
He published his first book, Tech Speak, in 1986 while still a book acquisition editor at Princeton University Press, where he had expanded the natural science program. He left the Press to accept a Guggenheim award in 1991. The resulting book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, became an international bestseller and was followed by Our Own Devices (2003) and The Efficiency Paradox (2018). He has been an international speaker at academic, government, and corporate meetings.
After graduating with highest honors from Princeton, he received a PhD in modern European history from the University of Chicago. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and received the Harvard Wadsworth Prize. He is a member of the Society for the History of Technology, the Cosmos Club of Washington, DC, and the Philadelphia Athenaeum.
