Claire Votava
Biography
Advanced to Candidacy
Claire Votava is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at UCLA. Her research traces the history of “Luddism” and examines how the afterlives of the early nineteenth-century machine-breaking movement have endured as a rhetorical and conceptual framework for articulating technoscientific anxiety and critique. She focuses particularly on the radical science movement in twentieth-century Britain, exploring how scientists and activists interrogated the social, political, and ethical dimensions of scientific practice.
She holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College in History and received a Fulbright Research Grant in 2020 to study gender and the Nobel Prize at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (cancelled due to COVID-19).
Awards & Grants
The Lisa Jardine Grant, Royal Society, London (2025)
The Peter Baldwin UCLA History Fellowship, Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2024)
Fulbright Research Fellowship, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2020-2021)
Conference Presentations
(Selected)
“Between the Expert and the Agitator: the CSS and the BSSRS” British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference, Leeds, UK (April 2025)
“A Laboratory for Critique: British Radical Science (1968-1990)” Materialist Approaches to the History of Knowledge Conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (April 2025)
“Radical Science in Britain: Towards a Conceptual History of Luddism” History of Science Society 2024, Mérida, Mexico (November 2024)
