Adam Quinn

Adam Quinn is a historian who studies the roles of work and the environment in the history of the United States computer industry. As a postdoctoral fellow with the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Science History Institute, he will focus on the labor that went into researching materials like high-purity silicon and the chemical processes of transforming these materials into computer components. This research will underscore the materiality of digital technology and its connections to the histories of chemistry, capitalism, pollution, and occupational health.

Adam earned his PhD in history from the University of Oregon in 2025. His dissertation was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Center for Environmental Futures/Just Futures Institute. His work has been published in Time, the Radical History Review, and Smithsonian Contributions to History and Technology.