Jimena Canales

Jimena Canales

Vita

Jimena Canales is a historian of science working towards a better understanding of science and technology in relation to the arts and humanities. She was formerly the Thomas M. Siebel Professor at the University of Illinois and an Associate Professor at Harvard University. Canales is the author of A Tenth of a Second (The Guardian’s Top 10 Books About Time) and The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Best Science Books 2015 Science Friday, NPR, and Brainpickings, Top Reads 2015 The Independent, Books of the Year 2016 The Tablet, 10 Books to Read if ‘A Brief History of Time’ Was Too Brief for You Undark 2018). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and NPR, and in numerous scholarly journals and her work has been presented at BBC, the Musée Georges Pompidou, the 11th Shanghai Biennial, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Liverpool Biennial.

Selected Publications

The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton University Press: hardcover 2015, e-book 2015, audio book 2015, paperback 2016. Greek (ROPI Publishing, 2017), Vietnamese (excerpt), Mandarin (Lijiang Publishing Limited, forthcoming)
A Tenth of a Second: A History, University of Chicago Press: hardcover 2009, e-book 2010, paperback 2011
“The Secret PR Push that Shaped the Atomic Bomb’s Origin Story”, The Atlantic (online April 18, 2017).
“This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity,", Nautilus, Issue 35, 21 April 2016.
“Albert Einstein’s Sci-Fi Stories: Time travel, relativity, and the lessons of transplanetary love,” The New Yorker (online 20 November 2015).
“Das Dynamit einer Zehntelsekunde: Walter Benjamin und die Wissenschaftsgesichte,” Aura und Experiment: Naturwissenschaft und Technik bei Walter Benjamin, ed. Kyung-Ho Cha (Turia und Kant: Vienna, 2017), pp. 203-223.
“Recording Devices,” In Blackwell Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernhard Lightman (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), pp. 500-514.
“Clock Time/ Lived Time” In Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, edited by Amy Elias and Joel Burges (NYU Press, 2016), pp. 113-128.
“The Media of Relativity: Einstein and Telecommunications Technologies,” Technology and Culture 56 (July 2015): 610-645.
“Einstein’s Discourse Networks,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 5 (May 2014), pp. 11-39.