Renny Hahamovitch

Fields of Study

• 20th century American History
• Science, Technology, and Society
• Outer Space ✨🚀👨‍🚀🌒✨

I'm a historian of 20th century American politics, science & technology, and poltical economy.

My dissertation, “The Space Age: Technological Prophecy and the Political Economy of Growth,” offers a novel social history of the emergence of the United States as a global space power from 1945 to the first moon landing in 1969. My work aims in particular to understand the future as a site of material conflict over state policy and technological development. The Space Age involved the most ambitious and futuristic planning ever undertaken by the US government, involving not only a multi-billion dollar, decade long program to land a man on the moon, but also plans to colonize other worlds, to industrialize and reform the “backwards” Deep South, to bring about a new industrial revolution on Earth, and to achieve total military supremacy over the planet. I trace the history of this national future as it was experienced by a variety of social groups, from industrial workers and suburban housewives to police and engineers.

I argue that the collapse of the infinite ambitions of the Space Age demonstrated a shift in state technological planning from long-term, deliberately “wasteful” development to short-term, economically “productive” development, with massive implications for American society. In the wake of the Space Age, nearly all state technology development had to be redesigned around more economically beneficial functions, publicly funded research disintegrated and was replaced by corporate R&D, while many Americans came to increasingly see themselves not as wage-earning producers who could benefit from state technological development but as tax-paying consumers who expected “returns” on their investments. This shift produced most of the manifold uses of space technology today but also left the federal government increasingly unable to engage in long-term planning or development. This transition in state planning from technological prophecy to technological profit, I argue, was at the center of a national shift from a Keynesian economy to a neoliberal one and coincided with wide-ranging changes in how everyday Americans understood and engaged with technology, citizenship, and the state.

Most centrally, my work seeks to understand the future as an important but understudied aspect of social relations, one produced through technology, orchestrated by the state, and embedded in the material makeup of society. The historical future offers a new axis to bring together diverse scholarly debates on politics, political economy, culture, science, and technology. Ruptures in late 20th century American history much discussed but rarely connected by historians—like the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, the prioritization of applied over basic research, and the shift from cultural obsessions of progress and utopia to decline and apocalypse—can be understood as different features of the same story of change in the production of the American future. Today, a better understanding of the historical role of the future as a site of social conflict and resolution is necessary as the doom of climate change and mass debate about the social consequences of technology encourage us to think about the limits and opportunities of long-term planning.

You can find a (somewhat dated) presentation of part of my research here.

I am honored this year to be a Rackham Predoctoral Fellow, a Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and a William T. Golden Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society. Last year I was an AHA-NASA Fellow in Aerospace History which has allowed me to be based partly in Chicago and partly in Washington, DC where I was a resident at the Kluge Center. I was also the recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Scholar Award in Honor of Robert M. Teeter and the Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History. In 2024 I was a fellow at Middlebury's Monterey Symposium in Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey and before that I was a Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellow with the National Humanities Alliance where I helped advocate for the humanities in higher education. Previously before coming to Michigan, I was a Visegrad Fellow at the Open Society Archivum in Budapest, which set me on the track of being a historian of space and the Cold War. I have also been supported in my dissertation research by fellowships from Georgia State University, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the FLAS Program, my department, and the University of Michigan. 

I also work alongside Professors Howard Brick, Paul Le Blanc, and Brian Whitener on a (massive!) historical document collection callled Independent Marxism in the American Century, four volumes of which are forthcoming with Haymarket Books and Brill.

Before Michigan, I lived in Budapest, Hungary where I received an MA in Comparative History and Jewish Studies from Central European University (now unfortunately forcibly exiled to Vienna). At CEU I completed a thesis entitled "Toward the Jewish Revolution: Yiddish Anarchists in New York City, 1901-1906," which traced how Yiddish radicals at the turn of the century went from rejecting to embracing ethnic Jewish politics between the assassination of President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 to the wave of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian empire around the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. It won the Peter Hanak Prize for Best Thesis and part of it was republished in With Freedom in My Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism, eds. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer (University of Illinois Press, 2023). That project was supported by CEU and by the Ruth B. Fein Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. Between my MA and PhD I was a high school teacher in Hungary and an Assistant Managing Editor at Central European University Press. 

In my sparetime I enjoy cooking and patronizing dive bars that struggle to pass health inspections.

If you are an incoming or perspective graduate student, please feel free to reach out to me to talk about the university, the department, Ann Arbor, or the STS program.