I’m a historian of information technology, focusing on the postwar United States.
In 2021, I joined Cornell’s Information Science department as an assistant professor where I am a member of the Critical and Humanistic Approaches to Computing research cluster. I also hold field memberships with the STS department and media studies program.
My work examines how shifts in abstract political notions such as trust and good governance are made concrete and transformed through the digital technologies we develop and use. In particular, I focus on the overlapping ways political, social, commercial, and epistemic values literally materialize in our payment and communication technologies, from automated check-processing to digital watermarking.
Prior to joining Cornell, I received a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard, an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet from Oxford, and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard. Before moving to the States, I also spent a couple of very rainy but formative years at UWC Red Cross Nordic on the west coast of Norway.
Book manuscript: Technologies of Trust
Technologies of Trust: Electronic Authentication in the Postwar United States (accepted; Infrastructures series at MIT Press) traces the history of technical attempts to solve the problem of trusting at a distance. Through a series of episodes from the history of computing, banking, and authentication, the book shows how we arrived today at a seemingly contradictory attitude towards trust in the US: we expect technology to do away with the need to trust public centralized institutions, while we delegate the negotiation of trust to an increasingly intricate and unknown network of trust vendors. I argue that over the past seven decades, a once technical and parochial way of thinking about achieving trust in electronic communication became a model for thinking about a much broader set of commercial, political, and social ties, a way to trust through technology.
Some work related to this project has already been published:
→ My chapter, “Cryptography Goes Public,” on the controversies surrounding the emergence of a new academic research area in the 1970s is part of a new edited volume, Just Code (link to full book pdf; Gerardo Con Diaz and Jeffrey Yost, eds.)
→ My article, “Checks and Balances,” on the work of the 1970s National Commission on electronic Funds Transfer, was part of a special issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing on “Computing Capitalisms” (available here).
Regularly Offered Courses at Cornell
→ INFO 1200/STS 1201: Information Ethics, Law, and Policy (co-taught with Daniel Susser; current session: Fall 2025; syllabus available here.)
→ INFO 2921/HIST 2920/AMST 2980/STS 2921: Inventing an Information Society (next offered: Spring 2026)
→ INFO 6940: Red Tape: The Media and Technology of Bureaucracy (last offered: Spring 2025)