Faculty Title

Assistant Professor of Informatics

Prof. Medina received her Ph.D. in 2005 from the MIT Doctoral Program in the History and Social Studies of Science and Technology and holds degrees in electrical engineering and women's studies from Princeton University. Medina's research uses technology as a means to understand historical processes. Her most recent work addressed the history of information technologies in Latin America and the role these technologies played in creating new forms of governance and the advancement of state ideological projects. Her current book manuscript traces the history of state computer use in Chile and its relationship to ideas of modernity during the 1960s and 1970s. The book will focus on the history of the Chilean Cybersyn project, an early computer network designed to regulate Chile's economic transition to socialism during the government of Salvador Allende.

Prof. Medina has received grants from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. She holds an adjunct appointment in the IU History Department and is affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). In 2007 she received the IEEE Life Members' Prize in Electrical History. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Medina worked as an electrical engineer specializing in image processing and machine vision.

Selected Publications:

• Cybernetic Socialism: The Untold Story of the Chilean Revolution (book manuscript in preparation).
• "Big Blue in the Bottomless Pit: The Early Years of IBM Chile," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing," (forthcoming 2008).
• "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile,"Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 571-606. Winner of the 2007 IEEE Life Members' Prize in Electrical History.
• "Ballet Slippers," in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Edited by Sherry Turkle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.
• "Computer Industry," in Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History. Edited by Eric Arnesen. New York: Routledge, 2006.
• "Computer Memory, Collective Memory: Recovering History Through Chilean Computing," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 27 (2005): 102-104.
• "Democratic Socialism, Cybernetic Socialism," in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Edited by Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.
• "Beyond the Ballot Box: Computer Science Education and Social Responsibility," Inroads - The SIGCSE Bulletin 36 (2004): 7-10.
• Eden Medina and David Mindell, "Engineering and Computer Science in Action: The Structure of Engineering Revolutions," in Using History to Teach Computer Science and Related Disciplines. Edited by Atsushi Akera and William Aspray. Washington, D.C.: Computer Research Associaton, 2004.
• "Freedom in Code: The Birth of the Chilean Free Software Movement," ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America 3 (2004): 23-24.

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