I am a Research Associate Professor at New York University in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Responsible AI. My 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 recently contributed to the book “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022), and I am currently writing a second book, Most Intelligent, on artificial intelligence, the tech industry, and the meritocracy.

My essays have been published 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, with forthcoming work in (among others) a Yale University Press book to be released in conjunction with the renovation of the Peabody Museum. 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.