Since Fall 2004 I've been an assistant professor in the School of Information studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where my wife, Maria Haigh, is also an assistant professor. The topics I teach there include project management, social informatics, organizational informatics and systems analysis. In the academic year 2008-9 I was a fellow of the Center for 21st Century Studies, which was a very rewarding and productive period.

Basic things about me? Well, the resume is on-line. But briefly: I grew up in England, where my youthful passions included reading, politics, magazine editing and computers. I did two degrees in computer science, where I discovered a natural affinity for programming, analysis and design. But I found more challenged by the social and philosophical issues around technology, and in the relationship between the world of code and world of people, than in the very narrow questions addressed by most computer science projects. So I looked around and decided to come to America and to do a Ph.D. on these topic. I was able to win a Fulbright award, which from the British point of view is like a Rhodes or Marshall to an American. I found myself in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Over six great years in Philadelphia, I slowly became an historian specializing in 20th Century America, in the history of technology and in the social history of work and business.

I was also able to educate myself in the theory and sociology of organizations through work with the Wharton school.  For a change of pace, and a better standard of living, I worked for three or four months every year as a computer consultant, tackling a number of database and internet-related development projects. I also taught a course of my own at Penn on the cultural history of the PC and the Internet, and another at Drexel (just round the corner) on data base management. From 2001 to 2003 I was at Colby College in Maine, first as a visiting instructor and then as a visiting researcher. Syllabi and resources for the courses I created there are available from my website teaching section. During the fall of 2003 I taught in the Informatics school of Indiana University, and from 2004 to 2007 I was working as consultant on an historical project to capture the history of software packages and libraries for numerical mathematics on behalf of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics via my partnership, The Haigh Group.

My dissertation is  called "Technology, Information and Power: Managerial Technicians in Corporate America, 1917-2000.” I'm now starting to work on revising the dissertation to make two books. More about this on my research page, and lots of published, forthcoming and draft papers on my writing page. In part because my school has disciplinary expectations for the production of a stream of articles, rather than one or two books a decade, I've conducted smaller research papers in a number of areas since completing my dissertation. These include a series of papers on the history of the database management system, another series on the software and services trade association ADAPSO, a lengthy piece on the early history of word processing, two chapters on the business history of Internet software (one on web browsers and email, the other on search engines and portals), some historiographic papers, and so on.

For my next big research project I am interested in the social history of the PC -- despite the shelves of books on the history of the PC, there has been no serious historical study of how people used their computers or why they brought them. I've already presented a couple of papers and organized some conference sessions on that topic.

As well as the general history of technology and history of business groups, I am pretty active within the history of computing community, and serve as editor of the Biographies Department of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and since 2005 have been the chair of the Special Interest Group on Computers, Information and Society of the Society for the History of Technology. Some of the material that used to be on this site, including the directory of historians of computing and the history of computing resource guide, are now to be found at www.sigcis.org. In 2007-8 I also chaired the corresponding group with ASIS&T, the main professional association in the information science field.