Iain Boal
2009 Fellow

Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California and Birkbeck College, London. Boal is one of the founders of the Retort collective, an association of radical writers, teachers, artists, and activists, which has existed in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past two decades, with whom he co-authored Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War along.He is co-editor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information and author of The Green Machine, A history of the Bicycle.  His forthcoming book The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure, traces key episodes in the history of ’enclosure’ – the fencing off, literally and figuratively, of the world’s commoners from their means of livelihood.  In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology.