I am a PhD candidate at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard and a research fellow at the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. I am interested in digital information technologies, changing notions of public trust and democratic governance, and narratives of crisis and future-making in the US, and how the ways people talk across these three domains often intersect and echo one another. My dissertation,"Technologies of Trust," traces technical attempts to solve the problems of trust and transparency, with a focus on the development of electronic payment systems and public key cryptography in late 20th- and early 21st-century US.
I am the 2019-20 Ambrose Monell Foundation Fellow in Technology and Democracy at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. I spent last summer as a research intern at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research--New England, where I researched the development of counterfeit deterrence systems. Previously, I was a 2018-19 Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow in Ethics, a Lemelson Center Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Throughout my graduate career, I served as a teaching fellow for courses on digital technology and culture, science and law in the US, and science and religion; supervised undergradaute theses on digital technologies and innovation, history of virtual reality, and the quatification of political science; and co-taught a short graduate seminar on global crisis and science fiction. I serve on the board of the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies.
Before joining the History of Science department at Harvard, I completed a MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, where my thesis examined the social and material infrastructure of Bitcoin. That work served as the basis for a co-authored article recently published in New Media & Society. While studying at the OII, I also pursued projects on urban digital geography and mobile technology. I hold a BA in Social Studies with a secondary in Computer Science from Harvard College. Before coming to the US, I spent two very rainy but formative years at Red Cross Nordic United World College in Flekke, Norway.
Pronouns: she/her/hers