Education
Bachelor of Arts in History, Barnard College, Columbia University (May 2012), Summa cum laude and department honors
Master of Arts in History, University of California, Berkeley (December 2021)
Research
I am an historian of “policing” in the broadest sense of the word. My work explores how communities enforce norms and create order (social, political, institutional, epistemological). Trained in the modern history of Europe and European empires, I follow people in widely different contexts as they struggle to answer the same basic questions: how do we decide what’s acceptable (in behavior, in speech, in truth claims), and what do we do when someone crosses that line? How do we police each other with justice? How do we honor the contingent, the contradictory, the particular – that is, the human – amidst our hunger for order, system, and rule?
My dissertation explores these questions through the history of road traffic rules: red lights, white lines, stop signs, speed limits, pedestrian crosswalks, the requirement to signal before turning, and all the other criminally-enforceable instructions we obey (and disobey) every time we step into the street. Practically none of these rules existed before the turn of the twentieth century; now, they are the most common way we come into contact with the criminal justice system. I study how traffic rules emerged, how they differed from earlier ways of ordering movement, and how people reacted to their introduction in cities around the world between about 1890 and 1940. Though my research is currently focused on Britain and its Empire, the story of modern traffic law is really a global one. In it, we can see old ideas about where social order comes from (custom, morality, common sense, courtesy, et al.) confronting new ideas (planning, system, and scientific analysis). My work connects changing philosophies of order to lived practices on the street, and shows that, as far as traffic is concerned, the triumph of modern rationalization was nowhere near as complete as we might think.
