PhD Candidate
History of Science
Education
BA in History of Art, English Literature, Williams College (2014)
MPhil in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge (2016)
Publications
“Robin Hill’s Cloud Camera: Meteorological Communication, Cloud Classification,” in The Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Objects and Investigations, ed. J. Nall, L. Taub, F. Willmoth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Reviews
Review for H-Net of Joris Mercelis, "Beyond Bakelite: Leo Baekeland and the Business of Science and Invention," Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation Series. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.
Selected Awards and Fellowships
S. Lane Faison, Jr. 1929 Prize
Redhead Prize, 2016, Top performance in essay component of Cambridge HPS MPhil
Rausing Prize, 2016, Top Performance in dissertation component of Cambridge HPS MPhil
Dr. Herchel Smith Fellowship at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, 2014-2016
DAAD Summer Language Grant, 2019
Smithsonian Institution Fellowship, 2021-2022
Research Fellowship, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Spring/Summer 2022
Irving and Jean Stone Fellow, Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, AY 2023/4
Fellow, Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, AY 2023/4
Research
My research focuses on the sciences of creativity and technological change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially how those sciences developed in relation to new forms of governance and expertise.
My dissertation, entitled Organizing the Future: Invention and American Federal Science, describes how and why scientific experts -- most of them employed by the federal government -- have framed artifacts and their making as inventions. I draw on archival and published records of three groups: examiners associated with the US Patent Office in the nineteenth century’s middle decades, ethnologists at the US National Museum and the Bureau of Ethnology in the 1880s and 90s, and sociologists in federal planning commissions of the 1920s and 30s. I show how invention was conceptualized as a distinctly modern kind of knowledge, and how its meaning as a legal category of intellectual property structured social scientific notions of technological development.
In a parallel project, I track the study of problem solving from comparative psychologists investigating the evolution of animal minds in the 1890s to Herbert Simon’s artificial intelligence research of the 1950s. By explaining why digital computers came to model human problem solving in ways that largely omitted the work of problem formulation, the essay outlines a political critique of powerful contemporary technologists who claim to ‘solve social problems’ through innovation, and especially through new forms of artificial intelligence. The project currently takes the form of an article-length essay, and I plan to expand it into a book-length monograph.
I am happy to be contacted by journals for book reviews or other contributions to the profession.
