Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi is the author of The Worlds of Herman Kahn (Harvard University Press, 2005), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on cold war and contemporary military science and technology. She spent close to two decades working as a historian of science.
Ghamari-Tabrizi earned a doctorate in 1993 from the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness Program, University of California at Santa Cruz with a specialization in the social studies of science and technology. From 1993 through 2004 she was an itinerant scholar. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the History of Science at Northwestern University, (1993-1994); a post-doctoral fellow at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and Mary, (1994-96); a post-doctoral fellow in the history of cold war science and technology in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University, (1996-98); a post-doctoral fellow in cultural studies (concurrently) at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University (1997-98); a senior research fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, (1998-99); a fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa for its seminar on digital culture, (June 2000); a fellow in the summer intensive course in military history at the United States Military Academy at Westpoint, (June 2002); a visiting scholar at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University for its Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict, (November 2002), and a participant in the U.S. Institute for Peace’s “Teaching Nonproliferation 2005 Summer Institute: Integrating Science and Politics in the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” at Washington and Lee University. In 2005-2006, she was a visiting scholar in the Arms Control and Disarmament Program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. From January through July 2011, she was the David B. Larson Fellow in Health and Spirituality at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
In addition to giving talks at her home institutions, she has given lectures at Cambridge University, Cornell, MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Library of Congress, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Claremont Graduate University, the Naval Post-Graduate School, the Air Force University, the University of Southern California, the University of Central Florida, Old Dominion University, the Washington State Historical Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Her pieces have appeared in academic journals, as well as The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and the American National Biography.
In 2010 Ghamari-Tabrizi wrote a book about the feminist biologist and historian of science, Donna Jean Haraway. She is currently revising the manuscript and readying it for submission.
Her most recent publications are:
An essay reflecting on nearly a decade of ethnographic study of defense training simulations, “Stepping outside of the container of story into silence and public mourning,” for Soldiering, Tal Arbel, Sabrina Peric eds., in submission.
“Cognitive and Perceptual Training in the Cold War Man-Machine Nexus,” in The Cold War In Pieces, Joel Isaacs ed., Oxford University Press, 2012.
An essay on the atomic bomb, which appears in The New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus, Werner Sollers, eds., Harvard University Press, 2009. You can find a copy of this here.
In 2009, she made the decision to change fields and begin training for a second career as a palliative care chaplain. In March 2011, she ordained as a minister in the Zen Peacemaker’s Order (Buddhist). She is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School, pursuing a Masters of Divinity.