Leo Marx (elected April 1985) died March 8, 2022. Marx, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Cultural History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a founder of the modern field of American studies. His seminal book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), began as his Harvard doctoral dissertation; it was considered among the foremost works in what became known as the “myth and symbol school” of American studies. Marx taught at the University of Minnesota and at Amherst College before joining the faculty of MIT, where he taught for nearly four decades. In addition to The Machine in the Garden, he wrote The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States (1988) and edited The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change (1988) with Susan Danly. Across his long career, the relationship between technology and American culture remained Marx’s abiding intellectual interest.
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