David E. Nye's publications focus on technology and American society. He was born in Boston but spent his childhood in rural Pennsylvania. He was educated at Amherst College and the University of Minnesota. He has taught in both the United States and Europe, and he has lectured in every western European country. Author or editor of 20 books, he has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Leverhulme Foundation, and national research councils in Denmark and Holland. He has appeared on NOVA, the BBC, and Danish television, and has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Harvard, MIT, Warwick, Oviedo, and Notre Dame. In 2005 he received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the lifetime achievement award and highest honor of the Society for the History of Technology. A new co-authored book will appear with MIT Press in September, 2017, The Environmental Humanities, A Critical Introduction (with Robert Emmett.) In spring, 2018 the final volume in his trilogy on American electrification will come out, also with MIT Press, tentatively titled American Illuminations.