Current Research Areas: history of science, science and technology studies, physical sciences, mathematical sciences, computing and computational sciences, political economy, critical theory and philosophy of science
Julia Menzel is a PhD candidate in MIT’s program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). Her research focuses on the history of modern physics and related mathematical and computational sciences from the 1970s to the present. She is currently writing a dissertation about the waning of “matter” as an organizing concern of physics and the emergence of a specifically theoretical way of life in the contemporary sciences.
Julia was trained in Physics at Yale University (BS, 2017) and MIT and in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (MPhil, 2018), where she was a Gates-Cambridge Scholar. Her dissertation research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Physics, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and several other academic institutions. In 2022-2023, she was the Friends of the American Philosophical Society predoctoral fellow. Her work has been published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences.