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Atlanta, GA | Posted: July 15, 2009
Summary Sentence:
Intriguing Research by HTS Professor
Full Summary:
Kristie Macrakis (PhD Harvard) joined Ivan Allen College as a Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Science in January 2009. She studies and teaches the history of science, espionage, and, this fall, will teach a class on the history of science under the Nazis.
Kristie Macrakis (PhD Harvard) joined Ivan Allen College as a Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Science in January 2009. She studies and teaches the history of science, espionage, and, this fall, will teach a class on the history of science under the Nazis.
Macrakis became interested in Nazi science while researching her dissertation in Berlin, Germany, which culminated in her first book Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press). Her second book was on science in communist East Germany, Science Under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Perspective (Harvard University Press).
Macrakis' most recent book Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World (Cambridge University Press) focuses on technology in the service of espionage and the reverse of that, espionage in the service of technology. The book is a groundbreaking study on the technical methods of one of the most feared and effective spy agencies in history, the East German Stasi.
Though it makes for riveting research and reading, Macrakis finds espionage wasteful. "My own view from studying history since World War II and the explosion of spy bureaucracies is that it has become a part of modern statecraft with very small return." Macrakis has co-edited another book, East German Foreign Intelligence: Myth, Reality and Controversy (Routledge) which publishes this month.
Macrakis has received research grants and awards from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the National Science Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, as well as a Fulbright grant. Her current work delves into material so cloaked in secrecy that she literally can't see what she's studying - the history of invisible ink from ancient to modern times.
"When I started on this subject matter," says Macrakis, "I didn't anticipate that it would be so intriguing, but invisible ink paradigmatically mirrors espionage. It's quite elusive as you can imagine: I keep coming across blank pages."
If invisible ink sounds irrelevant in the electronic age, consider that the CIA will not release formulas for it. Macrakis is currently searching for a chemist interested in reproducing invisible ink.
