I am a lecturer in the Harvard University Department of the History of Science and (from September through December 2014) a guest researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University in Berlin.
My research brings together urban planning history and theory with the history of social science, environment, and technology. In my first book, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), which was completed with a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, I examined the role of aerial photography in the formation of twentieth-century understandings of human relationships with space, spanning from ethnography and urban planning to mid-twentieth century social theory and activism. Since its release in 2013, the book has been reviewed in journals such as ISIS, Technology and Culture, the LSE Review of Books (Architecture and Urban Studies section), History of Photography, and Aperture magazine. My second book project, tentatively titled The Environment Built, explores the impact of social housing on the emergence of ideas about "environment" in Europe and America from the 1960s to today.