Ann Johnson, 28 May 1965 to 11 December 2016

I first met Ann Johnson, fittingly, at a joint meeting of several professional societies to which she contributed. It was the 4S-HSS-PSA meeting in Milwaukee in 2002. Davis Baird had corralled me in the hotel lobby to talk about a conference on nanotechnology that he was organizing in South Carolina the next March. I'd never met Davis before; I was a graduate student, he was a department chair and soon to be a dean and endowed professor. Fortunately, he was accompanied by Ann, whose goofy grin and eager questions soon put me at ease and hinted that while I should take Davis seriously, I shouldn't take him too seriously.¹

That was the Ann many of us first encountered. She was always ready to help out young scholars, and to make the academic life a bit more fun and human. She didn't put much stock in academic rank or pedigree or discipline—since good ideas often come from unexpected places, she preferred to create an environment in which all kinds of people would feel comfortable contributing their expertise. I saw her put that philosophy into practice when we organized two conferences together (the second along with Patrick McCray). Her first principle of conference planning was: no jerks! She used saltier language, of course. Instead of "jerks," she wanted a mix of men and women, young and old, acquaintances and strangers, inside the academy and outside it, close to her discipline and far from it—all having fun telling their stories.

As I got to know her through the nano studies community and then through the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), though, it became clear that playful Ann—always ready to crack a joke at her own expense, hoist a beer, complain about our profession's graybeards—was not the whole story. She worked unbelievably hard, without ever making a show of working hard. Every time we met, the natural flow of conversation would reveal a half dozen or more projects she had going, over an incredible range of topics: anti-lock brakes; nanotechnology policy; R&D road-maps; computational modeling in chemistry, engineering, and nanotechnology; arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh; superconductivity; engineering in the early American republic; air pollution. She always had some new source of funding she'd acquired, and she always had some new collaborator she was working with: other historians of science and technology, of course, but also philosophers, non-S&T historians, physicists, engineers, education scholars, etc. She never hesitated to dive into a new area, learn enough to become an expert, and start contributing. I'm fairly confident that some practitioners of the fields she dove into were put off by her lack of respect for their customs. Others, though, recognized a truly original mind and were lucky to collaborate with her.

Ann Johnson, 1965–2016

In fact, the history of technology was itself one of those fields that Ann leapt into from the outside. Although she did double-major in history and theater as an undergraduate at William and Mary, it was the theater path that she originally traveled down, not history. And she got pretty far down that path: after receiving an MFA from Yale's School of Drama, she became an associate professor of theater technology at the University of Southern California. Then in 1995 she quit to become a graduate student again, this time in the History of Science program at Princeton. That fearlessness in starting something entirely new was a lesson she tried to pass on to me, and I suspect to many of the other scholars she mentored. Unfortunately, because of that fearlessness, her interests were so diverse that it would be impossible to sum up her scholarship in its entirety. All I can do here is point to some of her main contributions to the history of technology, in the hope that T&C's peer journals will publish tributes that sketch her contributions to other fields.

One way to summarize Ann's oeuvre would...