• About Network
• Intellectual Agenda
• Who is who
• Advisory Group
• Management Team
• All ToE participants

TOE explores and defines ways to study transnational European history with a focus on the role of technology as a force of change. Technology is defined not only as machines, products, systems, and infrastructures but also as skills and knowledge that make them work. In addition, technological change is understood as a deeply political and social process involving people and institutions. This insight facilitates research into how the construction and use of new technologies have been crucial research sites for articulating a range of Europe's, and also more specific various European integration projects in material, institutional, and discursive ways.

From 1999 onwards TOE brought together a group of close to 200 scholars with shared interests from many disciplines and 17 countries. The participants formulated an Intellectual Agenda. This Intellectual Agenda was called Inventing Europe. Technology and the Making of Europe from 1850 to the Present, proposed to the European Science Foundation in their competition for EUROCORES programs in 2005, and established by ESF in 2006. This Intellectual Agenda is also used by researchers in grant applications, the development of new research projects and as a way of articulating the research concepts to newcomers.

Although its research agenda has become an ESF program, TOE continues to coordinate historians interested in the role of technology in modern European history across Europe. The coordination includes a willingness to integrate parts of research capacities, orient new research, and coordinate fundraising efforts on topics defined in the Intellectual Agenda. The network also has a workshop and conference program for exchanging and communicating results. Furthermore, annual summer schools are organized for the training of PhD students and junior scholars in the humanities and social sciences interested in the topics offered. Finally the goal is to publish research results in scientific books, articles, newsletters, website(s), and finally a coherent book series. For many of these activities TOE collaborates with the ESF Inventing Europe program.

The Foundation for the History of Technology (SHT) provides the secretariat for TOE. SHT is supported by the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands. SHT supports scholarly research in the history of technology since 1988. The organization’s mission is to develop and communicate knowledge that increases our understanding of the critical role of technology in the history of the western world. In 2006 SHT developed a PhD program for PhD students from Central and Eastern Europe tied to the TOE Intellectual Agenda.

TOE is based on voluntary contributions and is open to new participants.