Julia Menzel (Friends of the APS Predoctoral Fellowship) is a PhD candidate in the program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a historian of science, specializing in the history of physics from the nineteenth century to the present, and her work is broadly concerned with the historical relationship between capitalism and the natural sciences. She is currently writing a dissertation about the concept of “nature” in late-twentieth-century theoretical physics.
Julia holds a BS in Physics from Yale University and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where she was funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She is currently completing a master’s degree in the MIT Department of Physics. Her work has been published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and her dissertation research is supported by the National Science Foundation; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; and several other research institutions.
Research Project: "Enigmatic Nature: A Critical History of Theoretical Physics, 1967-2004"