| Myles W. Jackson | |
| Birth Date: | 25 November 1964 |
| Occupation: | Professor |
| Organization: | The Institute for Advanced Study, New Jersey, USA |
| Education: | Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science |
| Alma Mater: | Cambridge University |
Myles W. Jackson (born Paterson, New Jersey on 25 November 1964) is currently the inaugural Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and lecturer with the rank of professor of history at Princeton University.[1] He was the inaugural Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of the History of Science at New York University-Gallatin, professor of history of the faculty of arts and science of New York University, professor of the division of medical bioethics of NYU-Langone School of Medicine,[2] faculty affiliate of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, NYU School of Law, and director of science and society of the college of arts and science at NYU.[3] He was also the inaugural Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2007 to 2012. The chair is named after Bern Dibner (1897–1988), an electrical engineer, industrialist, historian of science and technology and alumnus of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
He received his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University in 1991. Before joining the faculty of New York University, he taught at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. He has been a senior fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.
He is the author of numerous articles on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and technology, with a particular emphasis on the cultural history of nineteenth-century German physics. He has also authored two books, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany [4] and Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics,[5] which won the Paul Bunge Prize of the German Chemical Society for the best work on the history of scientific instruments in 2005 and the Hans Sauer Prize for the best work on the history of inventors and inventions in 2007. Spectrum of Belief has been translated into German, Fraunhofers Spektren: Die Präzisionsoptik als Handwerkskunst.[6] He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Music, Sound, and the Laboratory, with the University of Chicago Press published in 2013. He is the editor of Perspectives on Science: Gene Patenting (MIT Press, 2015).[7] And his monograph, The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race, was published by MIT Press in 2015 (paperback 2017).[8] He has just completed a book entitled Broadcasting Fidelity: German Radio and the Rise of Early Electronic Music (Princeton University Press, 2024), which explores the collaborations between physicists, electrical engineers, physiologists, and musicians that led to improving the fidelity of early German radio broadcasts during the 1920s and '30s and inventing an early electronic musical instrument, the trautonium.[9]