Martians of Engineering: Calculating the Unthinkable in Cold War Switzerland

Silvia Berger, PhD, is Associate Faculty Member at the Center History of Knowledge (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich) and Lecturer at the University of Zurich’s Department of History. She is the author of the award-winning book Bakterien in Krieg und Frieden. Eine Geschichte der medizinischen Bakteriologie in Deutschland, 1890-1933, Göttingen 2009. Her teaching and research include the history of knowledge in the Atomic Age, civil protection and defensive living, the underground and vertical technologies, the history of bacteriology, and medical histories of World War I. 
She currently finishes her second book which centers on the social, cultural and scientific history of nuclear bomb shelters in Cold War Switzerland and beyond. Her talk will focus on the knowledge in protective structures research developed by patriotic Swiss civil engineers at the height of the Cold War.