I am always learning and often writing, typically with a surprising take on tech and history. My award-winning first book, A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Harvard Univ. Press, 2018, hardcover, e-book, audio book), has been featured in the LA Review of Books, The Nation, Public Books, and the Australian Book Review and widely reviewed elsewhere. I contributed to the book “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022), which grew out of a popular Slate series on “The Lines of Code that Changed Everything.” My writing has received Editor’s Choice distinction and has been featured in popular and academic media, including Science News, Slate, Spike, Lady Science, the Smithsonian’s What It Means to Be American series, Information & Culture, and IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. I am currently writing books on technology, women, and work.

I will perpetually be a student but have also been the professor, most recently an Associate Professor at New York University in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society. At NYU I directed research on Gender, Race, and Power in Artificial Intelligence at AI Now before I was appointed Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Responsible AI. I have shared my tech expertise at venues ranging from the United Nations and Cambridge University to the Computer History Museum and Google and consulted on projects including the pilot television episode of Girls Code, and the documentaries The Queen of Code and The Birth of BASIC. I earned my PhD in History from Yale in 2015; prior to that I also studied at MIT, Duke, UCL, Cambridge, and Dartmouth, where I earned my BA with a double major in mathematics and history.