"...[an] LSD-trip of a book ..."
- Robert Matthews, New Scientist

"...adventurous approach and rewarding..."
- Louis Menand, The New Yorker

"... a stunningly researched and entertaining book..."
- Bill Geerhart, Conelrad.com

Read the full reviews and more...

About The Author

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi is an independent scholar living in Orlando, Florida. Ghamari-Tabrizi is the author of The Worlds of Herman Kahn (Harvard University Press, 2005), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on cold war and contemporary military science and technology.

In February 2003, and again in May 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Ghamari-Tabrizi a grant to underwrite ethnographic field work at several sites in the United States where the military and sectors of the entertainment industry are collaboratively producing wargames, interactive training simulations, virtual environments, and narrative films visualizing future technologies, tactics, and scenarios. She is currently working on a book based on this research which explores the cultural and social meanings of the production of defense simulations against the background of America’s media-saturated society.

Ghamari-Tabrizi earned a doctorate in 1993 from the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness Program, University of California at Santa Cruz with a specialization in the social studies of science and technology. From 1993 through 2004 she was an itinerant scholar. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the History of Science at Northwestern University, (1993-1994); a post-doctoral fellow at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and Mary, (1994-96); a post-doctoral fellow in the history of cold war science and technology in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University, (1996-98); a post-doctoral fellow in cultural studies (concurrently) at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University (1997-98); a senior research fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, (1998-99); a fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa for its seminar on digital culture, (June 2000); a fellow in the summer intensive course in military history at the United States Military Academy at Westpoint, (June 2002); a visiting scholar at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University for its Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict, (November 2002), and a participant in the U.S. Institute for Peace’s “Teaching Nonproliferation 2005 Summer Institute: Integrating Science and Politics in the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” at Washington and Lee University. In 2005-2006, she was a visiting scholar in the Arms Control and Disarmament Program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

In addition to giving talks at her home institutions, she has given lectures at Cambridge University, Cornell, MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Claremont Graduate University, the Naval Post-Graduate School, the Air Force University, the University of Southern California, the University of Central Florida, Old Dominion University, the Washington State Historical Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her pieces have appeared in academic journals, as well as The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and the American National Biography. Her most recent publication, an essay on the atomic bomb, was just published in The New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus, Werner Sollers, eds., Harvard University Press, 2009.

In addition to working on the simulation book, Ghamari-Tabrizi is presently finishing up a book-length manuscript regarding the work of the feminist biologist and historian of science, Donna Jean Haraway. As part of this project, she has edited a companion volume of essays written by Haraway’s colleagues and former students called NatureCultures: Thinking with Donna Haraway which is forthcoming.