RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research interests encompass culture, technoscience, capitalism, and bureaucracy, and my scholarship examines the production and circulation of knowledge in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. My first book, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a history of forecasting that explores how the routinized predictions of everyday life functioned as tools for risk management as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans came to believe in the promise and accept the limitations of predicting the future. My current research explores paperwork, bureaucracy, and investigation in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States.
COURSES TAUGHT
Undergraduate
- 506:233 History of the Future
- 512:235 Accidents and Disasters in the U.S. & the World
- 512:237 Data: A Social History
- 512:329 Technology & Nature in American History
Graduate
- 510:535 Graduate Colloquium in the History of Technoscience & Capitalism
- 510:535 Graduate Colloquium in the History of Technology & Nature
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- “The Case of the Competing Pinkertons: Managing Reputation through the Paperwork and Bureaucracy of Surveillance,” in Surveillance Capitalism in America: From Slavery to Social Media, ed. Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
- “The Information Economy,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jon Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- “Forecasting,” in Information: A Historical Companion, ed. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 452-57.
- “‘A Tornado is Coming!’: Counterfeiting and Commercializing Weather Forecasts from the Gilded Age to the New Era,” Journal of American History 105, no. 3 (2018): 538-62.
- Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- "Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital: The Meteorological Infrastructure of American Empire in the West Indies," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 4 (2016): 418-45.
- “‘Cotton Guessers’: Crop Forecasters and the Rationalizing of Uncertainty in American Cotton Markets, 1890-1905,” in The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, eds. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (Palgrave, 2012).
- “U.S. Weather Bureau Chief Willis Moore and the Reimagination of Uncertainty in Long-Range Forecasting,” Environment and History 17 (2011): 79-105.
AWARDS
- Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Best Article Prize, 2018
- School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contribution to Undergraduate Education, 2018
- Digital Humanities Seed Grant, Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative, 2016-17
- American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, 2010-12
- Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2009-10
- American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship, 2007-2008
- Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize, Society for the History of Technology, 2004
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
- American Historical Association
- Business History Conference
- Organization of American Historians
- History of Science Society
- Society for the History of Technology
- Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
