Profile picture of Adam Quinn

Adam Quinn

Graduate Employee
History
Office: 350A McKenzie Hall
Research Interests: environmental history, social movements, history of technology, modern US history

Biography

Adam Quinn is a PhD candidate in history focusing on environment and social movements in the US. His dissertation explores the role of workers, nature, and environmental justice in the history of the American computer industry. It examines the working conditions and protest movements of people like silicon miners, computer factory workers, and incarcerated electronic waste recyclers. Considering these jobs together frames workers and nature as actors in computer history, reveals unexpected continuities between industrial and supposedly “post-industrial” capitalism, and ties the history of technology to the history of environmental justice movements. His research has also encompassed other American and transnational social movements, including anarchism and the prison abolition movement. His work has been published in the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, the Radical History Review, Radical Americas, and H-Net Book Channel. Adam holds an MA in History from the University of Vermont, where his thesis examined the long history of laws restricting the speech and immigration of radicals leading up to the First Red Scare, and a BA in History and Social Theory from Hampshire College, where his thesis examined the roles of nature and both local and transnational labor politics in building a militant Italian anarchist movement in early-twentieth century Vermont.