Biography
I am a historian of race and computing in the United States. My research spans topics ranging from bureaucracy and surveillance to environmental media and the radical politics of science and technology.
My current book project, Automating Blackness: Race, Computing, and Politics in the Postwar United States, is a history of efforts to find a technical solution to the problem of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. Following the efforts of government officials, civil rights activists, and business leaders to achieve racial equality through computational means, as well as their frustrations and failures, Automating Blackness argues that attempts to render the effects of racialization invisible within technological projects transformed twentieth-century racial discourses and shaped a data-oriented approach to social policy that pursued individual moral reform rather than structural sources of inequality.
My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.