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Petroski
to Deliver 3rd Annual Lupton Library Lecture
Dr. Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic, professor of civil engineering
and professor of history at Duke University and the author of 12 books,
including The Book on the Bookshelf, will deliver the 3rd annual Lupton
Library Lecture April 7, 7 p.m. in the Raccoon Mountain Room of the
UTC University Center.
Petroski will base his lecture on the research and human interest stories
found in The Book on the Bookshelf , a book lover/engineer’s look
at books and book storage. A reception and book signing will follow.
The event is free and open to the public.
Please direct questions about the event to Steve Cox, Special Collections,
Lupton Library, or call (423)425-2186.
More about Henry Petroski:
He has written on many aspects of engineering and technology, including
design, success and failure, error and judgment, the history of engineering
and technology, and the use of case studies in education and practice.
Petroski’s books on these subjects, which are intended for professional
engineers and general readers alike, include: To Engineer Is Human, which
was adapted for a BBC-television documentary; The Pencil; The Evolution
of Useful Things; Design Paradigms (named by the Association of American
Publishers as the best general engineering book published in 1994); Engineers
of Dreams; Invention by Design; Remaking the World; The Book on the Bookshelf; and Paperboy, a memoir about growing up on Long Island in the 1950s and
about what predisposed him to become an engineer. His latest book is
Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design, and a new collection
of his essays will appear in September under the title, Pushing the
Limits: More Adventures in Engineering. The languages into which his books have
been or are being translated include: Chinese, Finnish, German, Hebrew,
Italian, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish.
In addition to having published many technical articles in refereed journals,
Petroski has published numerous non-technical articles and essays in
newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Washington
Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and Scientific American. Since 1991, he
has been writing the engineering column in the bimonthly magazine American
Scientist, and now also writes a bimonthly column on the engineering
profession for ASEE Prism. He lectures regularly to both technical and
general audiences, in the U.S. and abroad, and has been interviewed frequently
on radio and television, including on NPR’s All Things Considered and other public-radio shows, and on CNN's Talk
Back Live and NBC's Today.
Before moving to Duke in 1980, Petroski was on the faculty of the University
of Texas at Austin and on the staff of Argonne National Laboratory. He
is a professional engineer licensed in Texas and a chartered engineer
registered in Ireland. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment
for the Humanities Fellow, and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center.
Among his other honors are the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Civil Engineering History and Heritage
Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, honorary doctoral
degrees from Clarkson University, Manhattan College, Trinity College
(Hartford, Conn.), and Valparaiso University, and distinguished engineering
alumnus awards from Manhattan College and the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. He is a fellow of the American Society of Civil
Engineers (whose History and Heritage Committee he chairs), a fellow
of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, an honorary member of the
Moles, and a member of the the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
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