Claire Votava
Biography
Advanced to Candidacy
Claire Votava is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at UCLA. Her work traces the afterlives of the early nineteenth-century machine-breaking movement known as the Luddites, examining how the figure of the Luddite, and the concept of “Luddism,” endured as a rhetorical and conceptual framework for articulating anxieties about and critiques of science and technology from the late Victorian period to the near present. Situated at the intersection of the history of science and technology, new histories of capitalism, and the history of the British Empire, her dissertation, tentatively titled “‘Who Makes the Luddites Rise?’: Technoscientific Resistance and the History of Luddism in Britain, 1880-1980,” explores how debates over technological change were bound up with broader questions of labor, political economy, and imperial power.
Votava’s research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and the Royal Society of London. She holds a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College.
Publications
Claire Votava, “The Council for Science and Society and the Politics of Expertise, 1972-1990,” in “New Approaches to the Relationship between Science and Democracy during Crises,” Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, September 2026 (DOI: 10.1007/s11024-026-09668-5)
Awards & Grants
Louise Ritchie Research Fellow, Short-Term, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Garden, Pasadena, California (September 2026)
Selected Participant, Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences, “Problems of Growth,” Ischia, Italy (28 June – 5 July 2026)
Research Fellow, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (2025-2026)
Visiting Doctoral Student, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge (April – June 2025)
The Lisa Jardine Grant, Royal Society, London (January – March 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) (Cancelled due to Covid-19 Pandemic)
Conference Presentations
(Selected)
“The Specter of Luddism: Memory, Metaphor, and Technoscientific Dissent in Late Victorian Britain” North American Conference on British Studies, Pasadena, California (November 2026)
“‘Who Makes the Luddites Rise?’: Popular History, Satire, and Late Victorian Technoscientific Dissent” European Society for the History of Science/History of Science Society Joint Meeting 2026, University of Edinburgh (July 2026)
“Between Radicalism and Technocracy: The Council for Science and Society and the Politics of Risk and Expertise, 1973-1990” History of Science Society 2025, New Orleans (November 2025)
“Assemblages and Afterlives: From the Luddites to Luddism” Graduate Workshop, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge (June 2025)
“Laboratory Luddism and Activist Science” 14th International Conference on the History of Chemistry, Valencia, Spain (June 2025)
“A Laboratory for Critique: British Radical Science (1968-1990)” Materialist Approaches to the History of Knowledge Conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (March 2025)
