Edward Tenner

Edward Tenner is author of the internationally acclaimed books Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences and Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity. He has been a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Atlantic, and Technology Review, and has been a guest on public television and cable networks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Born in Chicago, Edward Tenner graduated with highest honors from Princeton, received the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was a German Academic Exchange Service scholar and then a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Turning from a conventional career in European history, he became a science editor and then executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press, where he sponsored books including Richard Feynman’s best-selling QED. He left publishing in 1991 to take up a Guggenheim Fellowship as a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study. At Princeton he has remained a visiting lecturer or scholar in departments in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, and is currently affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Schools Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. He was a founding advisor of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and is now one of its Distinguished Scholars. He is also a visiting fellow in the Rutgers Department of History, and is an editorial board member and contributor of Raritan Quarterly Review.

Edward Tenner has spoken at the 2011 TED Conference and at Microsoft, Intel, AT&T, and some of America’s leading private equity and international security conferences, and at meetings ranging from publishing technology to agricultural research