Chris Otter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History. His primary research area is the history of technology, but he also has interests in the history of science, food history, urban history, the history of medicine, and the history of the human brain and mental health. He teaches courses on the history of science, technology, food, and human health. He is the author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 (Chicago, 2018), and Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago 2020). He is currently researching and writing The Technosphere: A History of Humans and the Things They Make. This history approaches the earth’s technosphere not as a recent and purely planetary phenomenon, but as the material milieu within which all human history has unfolded. The technosphere is addressed at seven scales: tools, containers, agglomerations, machines, networks, anthromes, and anthropogenic sinks. Fundamental problems facing our species today – inequality, violence, climate change, epidemic diseases – are all viewed as being shaped, framed, or even caused by pervasive material structures and patterns. His next project will be an exploration of the brain in Victorian Britain.