Suzanne Moon

I specialize in the history of technology, with a focus on the modern history of Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly.  My work has explored  how technology has been entangled in debates about justice, equity, and national identity in Indonesia from the late colonial period to the present day. My current work explores agriculture, climate change, and the sociotechnical imagination. I ask how present-day projects to reshape agriculture and animal husbandry in response to climate change  are inflected by longer histories of sociotechnical transformation in food provisioning, and explore the imaginaries, low-tech and high-tech, that inform visions of future food production.

• B.S. Auburn University, Department of Computer Engineering, 1984
• M.S. Duke University, Department of Electrical Engineering, 1986
• M.A. Cornell University, Department of Science and Technology Studies, 1996
• Ph.D. Cornell University Department of Science and Technology Studies, 2000

• History of technology
• Indonesian history
• History of agriculture and environment
• Climate change
• Technology, science, and colonialism
• Southeast Asian history

• Technology in Southeast Asian History, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.
• “Sugar”, in Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, edited by Jeannie Whayne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• “Moral Narratives of Technological Change in the Early Green Revolution”. In Thinking Through Science and Technology: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics in an Engineered World, edited by Glen Miller. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2023.
• “A Sociotechnical Order for the Umma: Connecting Islam and High Technology in Suharto’s Indonesia”, History and Technology 36, no. 2 September 2020.