research
I study the social and cultural lives of machines. My research is particularly interested in understanding the historical place of machines and machine behaviors in the fabric of modern societies and the interior lives of people. I also develop digital and artifact-based methods and computational tools for investigating the marginalized and forgotten aspects of that history. For a list of publications, click here. Here’s a description of the projects that I’m currently working on.
THE BLACK ANDROIDS AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL UNDERGROUND
This five-year SSHRC-funded project explores the black technological experience in 19th and early 20th century America through a history of the "black androids" — automata in the form of black humans. From the 18th century onwards, hundreds of black androids were produced, purchased, and displayed across five continents. In the United States, these machines formed part of a culture of minstrelsy concentrated along Broadway Street in New York City. Using the technologies of the time — steam, mechanics, electricity — these American androids portrayed black people in pastoral, leisurely, and non-technological roles, supporting the myth that technology is opposed to blackness. The androids' surface, however, masked how those same technologies featured centrally in the lives, imaginations, and self-identities of black New Yorkers. This project examines that duality: how the technologies that drove the androids' racist depictions also figured crucially in black technological experiences, agency, and selfhood in 19th and early 20th century New York. Focusing on the period from 1830 to 1930, the project analyzes archival collections, material artifacts, court documents, city records, periodicals, and sound and image repositories to produce the first history of android technologies as both race-making objects and central elements in the technological experiences of African-Americans.
RELIABLE HUMANS, TRUSTWORTHY MACHINES: HISTORIES OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL SELF
This book project, under contract with MIT Press, examines how observers from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries saw the problem of failing machines as a problem of the self — a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, or threatened, or presupposed. From 18th-century sentimentalism and the guillotine, through Victorians’ nervous fascination with railway accidents, to industrial breakdowns in Jazz-Age America and the suspect citizens of the Cold War, this book excavates the largely-forgotten concerns that linked selves and social orders to the problematic workings of technology. Connecting those developments to our own worries in the early-21st century, the book encourages us to see the history of modern technology not simply as a social history of mechanisms and devices, but as a cultural history of the self and of the social orders it made possible.
ARCHITECTURES OF DARKNESS
This article-length project examines the history of manufacturing facilities for photographic film in the early 20th century. It asks how architects, whose work has so often organized buildings around light, designed edifices around darkness. The article incorporates aspects of disability history, examining a crucial workforce in these facilities — blind workers.
ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES
To explore how we might produce alternative histories of science and technology, I organized a conference: “Materiality: Objects and Idioms in Historical Studies of Science and Technology.” The aim was to explore materiality as both historical object and emerging idiom in our field. On one hand, we sought to push into new sites of inquiry: How do we historicize materiality? When does materiality become a concern for historical actors and for scholars? How do the specific, local materialities of scientific and technical work figure in the wide-scale sweep of global historical developments? But alongside new sites and questions, we set out to explore emerging research tools and modes of scholarly expression that moved beyond traditional text into sounds, visuals and objects.
I’m continuing my research in this area with projects designed to complement the sophisticated text-based methods of history of science and technology with research tools and practices centred on material artifacts. It is part of a broader move within the humanities and social sciences that seeks to use objects as a way of gaining insights that are either difficult or impossible to acquire through a traditional emphasis on the written word.
upcoming talks
TBA
RECENT TALKS
“Black Androids: History and the Technological Underground,” History of Science Colloquium, Princeton University, USA
“What Automation Means: Creativity in the Age of ChatGPT,” Princeton Public Library, Princeton, NJ, USA
“Thinking Organically,” Center for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, CANADA
“Histories from Broken Worlds,” Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University, USA
The Selves of Scientific Management: Charting Human and Machine Failures at the Dawn of the Jazz Age
Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, Milan, ITALY
Performance et savoirs: lectures, relectures, perspectives critiques
EHESS Paris, FRANCE
Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self
Munk School of International Affairs, University of Toronto
Unreliable Humans, Failing Machines: The Lost Histories of the Technological Self, Center for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), University of California — Berkeley, USA
New Perspectives on the History of The Technological Self and Science in the Cold War, Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Sporadic Phenomena: The Natural History of Cold-War Technologies, Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Strangelove’s Machines: Technological Theaters of the Global Cold War, “Books that Matter,” Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
Media
Interviews
Film
Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies
Podcasts
New Books Network - New Books in Science, Technology and Society
Radio
CBC Ideas
Here and Now — CBC Toronto
Radio Active — CBC Edmonton
On the Go — CBC St. John's
All in a Day — CBC Ottawa
All Points West — CBC Victoria
Mainstreet PEI — CBC Charlottetown
Mainstreet NS — CBC Halifax
Airplay — CBC Whitehorse