Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. At Stanford, his teaching includes courses in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Program in Science, Technology & Society. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security (e.g. climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter).
Edwards holds a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1988) and a bachelor’s degree in Language and Mind from Wesleyan University (1980). His work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. He has been a Carnegie Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Distinguished Faculty in Sustainability at the Graham Sustainability Institute. Edwards has held visiting positions at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences (SciencesPo), France; the Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Sciences, Norway; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa; the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Cornell University.
With Geoffrey C. Bowker, Edwards edits the MIT Press Infrastructures book series. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Big Data & Society, Information & Culture, and Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society, and was previously a deputy editor of Climatic Change.
Edwards' current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, as well as further work on the history of climate science and other large-scale environmental data systems.
