RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research focuses on the production and circulation of knowledge in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. I have specific interests in forecasting and ideas about the future, risk and catastrophe, and data practices. My first book, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), tells the story of how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans came to believe in the promise and accept the limitations of predicting the future of the weather, the harvest, the market, and everyday life. I am currently working on two book projects: “Weather Capitalism: Gambling on the Weather from Rainfall Lotteries to Wildfire Markets” and “Data Driven: Information and Investigation in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States.”
COURSES TAUGHT
Undergraduate
- 506:233 History of the Future
- 512:235 Accidents and Disasters in the US & the World
- 512:237 Data & American Society: From Almanacs to Algorithms
- 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
Looking Forward: Prediction & Uncertainty in Modern America
University of Chicago Press, 2017
- “Predictive Knowledge Infrastructures and Future-related Expertise Before the Cold War,” The American Sociologist 55, no. 2 (2024): 90-104.
- “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, 2021), 65-83.
- “The Information Economy,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jon Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014—. Article published May 26, 2021).
- “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.
- “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, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49-72.
- “U.S. Weather Bureau Chief Willis Moore and the Reimagination of Uncertainty in Long-Range Forecasting,” Environment and History 17 (2011): 79-105.
SELECTED HONORS & AWARDS
- Fellow, The New Institute, Hamburg, 2025
- Teaching and Learning with Technology Excellence in Online Teaching Award, Rutgers University, 2023
- 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