Overview
Professor Kline’s current research area is the history of artificial intelligence.
He is the author of numerous articles on the history of engineering, industrial research, technology in rural life, and information science and technology, as well as engineering ethics. The author of three books - Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (1992), Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (2000), and The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (2015), all published by Johns Hopkins University Press, he is now writing a book on the history of artificial intelligence from the Cold War to the present.
He is past president of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology, former chief editor of IEEE's Technology & Society Magazine, and former advisory editor for Technology and Culture, Isis, and Engineering Studies. SHOT awarded him its highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2016.
Before his retirement in 2020, he founded and directed the Bovay Program in History and Engineering Ethics in the College of Engineering and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of science and technology and the history of information technology.
Recently, former graduate students and colleagues honored him with a festschrift: Technological Humanities: Essays in Honor of Ronald R. Kline, edited by Jennifer Lieberman and Anto Moshin (Springer Verlag, 2026).
Publications
- “Cybernetics and Information Theory in Human-Machine Communication,” in Andrea L. Guzman, Rhonda McEwen, & Steve Jones, eds., The Sage Handbook of Human-Machine Communication (London: Sage, 2023), 22-31.
- “How Disunity Matters to the History of Cybernetics in the Human Sciences,” History of the Human Sciences, 33 (2020): 12-35.
- “The Modem that Still Connects Us,” in Historical Studies in Computing, Information and Society: Insights from the Flatiron Lectures, edited by William Aspray (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019), pp. 29-50.
- “Inventing an Analog Past and a Digital Future in Computing,” in The Early Digital, edited by Thomas Haigh (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019), pp. 19-39.
- “Mathematical Models of Technological and Social Complexity,” in Technology and Mathematics: Philosophical and Historical Investigations, edited by Sven Ove Hansson (Berlin: Springer International, 2018), pp. 285-304.
- Jennifer L.Lieberman and Ronald R. Kline, “Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future: Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian Novel, and an Alternative American Sociotechnical Imaginary,” Configurations, 25, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 1-27.
- Greg Adamson, Ronald Kline, Katina Michael, and M. G. Michael. “Wiener’s Cybernetic Legacy and the Growing Need for the Interdisciplinary Approach,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 103 (2015): 2208-2214.
