A quick list
This page exists in its current format because it’s better to have fractional professional web presence than to spend another year without any at all.
About this “Laura Rubin” character…
Laura Rubin is an aggressively-interdisciplinary writer, lecturer, and costumer living and working in the Silicon Valley. She brings together the history of dress and technology, with an emphasis in experimental archaeology and primary source research.
Talks on Docs
(in my professional life, I’m a technical writer.)
- Nordic APIs - APIDays Austin 2024 - How to Rethink and Reshape your API Documentation
Curiosity Guild
- Wicked Ways, March 3rd 2026 - Curator, “San Francisco, the City that Knows How”, and Bonus Content: “Here’s whatnow?”
Odd Salon Talks
- Odd Salon ASTOUND - February 2025 - Modernity and Spectacle: Lighting the Tower of Jewels
- Odd Salon BAMBOOZLED - September 2023 - Counterfeit or Collectable: Economic Opportunism & the Shadwell Forgeries
- Odd Salon REANIMATE - March 2022 - Publishing on Perishing: the 19th Century Medical Race to Identify Final Irreversible Death
- Odd Salon Giving Tuesday Livestream 2021 - History of Gelatin
- Odd Salon SCHEME - August 2019 - Sutro Saves the Silver
- Odd Salon ODDMENTS 2018 - December 2018 - Death on Rails: the London Necropolis Railway
- Odd Salon EPIC - May 2018 - Indigenous Accuracy (no recording available :( ))
- Odd Salon ODDMENTS 2017 - December 2017 - Jeremy Bentham and the Formula for Happiness
- Odd Salon JUSTICE - August 2016 - Curator, invocation. (DNA Lounge webcast at Archive.org)
- Odd Salon ARTIFACT - July 2016 - Buried Beards of the Thames (DNA Lounge webcast at Archive.org)
- Odd Salon FATE - February 2016 - Rota Fortuna: The Original Wheel of Fortune (DNA Lounge webcast at Archive.org)
- Odd Salon UNDEAD - October 2015 - Not Dead Yet: William Tebb & the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial (DNA Lounge webcast at Archive.org)
- Odd Salon CURSED - March 2015 - “…But You Can Never Leave” – The Truth of the Curse of Santa Cruz (DNA Lounge webcast at Archive.org)
- Odd Salon ILLUSION - July 2014 - The Illusion of Perfection: Fake Boobs, Fake Butts & Our Unending Struggle With Human Inadequacy (DNA Lounge webcast at Archive.org)
Other Odd Salon Stuff
- Odd Salon ODDMENTS 2016 - Costume contest organizer
- Odd Salon ODDMENTS 2017 - Costume contest organizer
Other talks - repeats and originals
- Storytelling at the Menlo Park Library - Nov 12, 2025 - “Library Returns” - Modernity and Spectacle: Lighting the Tower of Jewels
- Exploratorium After Dark - Spooky Season 2021 - Undead Science - William Tebb and the Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial
- Litcrawl 2018 - Cemetery Stories - Death on Rails
- San Francisco Browning Society - October 12, 2018 - Mudlarking and the Material Culture of London
- Dickens Fair participant workshops: What Victorian Londoners Knew, and The Material Culture of Victorian London.
- GBACG April 2017 - Mudlarking and the Material Culture of Dress
- Nerd Nite SF # 73 - June 7, 2016 - Mudlarking and Material Culture
- Marvelous Strange at Five Months Gallery - March 14 2016 - Under Glass: The Victorian Passion for Collecting,
- Nerd Nite London - July 15, 2015 - Illusion of Beauty
- Nerd Nite SF #56 - Jan 12, 2015 - Illusion of Beauty