I’m a historian of science and technology whose research focuses on computing and logic in modern America and Europe. I aim to understand how human beings craft things like computer programs and logical proofs. What practices and what social contexts allow these abstract artifacts to appear neutral, rational, and rigorous?

I am a curator of history of science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. I work especially closely with our mathematics and computing collections.

My current book project, Writing the Rules of Reason: The Social Life of Notation from Logic to AI, explores how methods of writing have shaped understandings of natural and artificial reasoning alike. I track logic’s trajectory from ancient science of valid inference to mathematical foundation of computing, with material activity always in foreground. I focus on the changing practices of writing that logicians used to capture their theories on paper, and how those symbolic techniques shaped later efforts to automate computation and other purportedly intelligent activities. My other active areas of research include gender and domesticity in the history of mathematics, and of the cultural history of early programming languages.

Before coming to the National Museum of American History, I held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford. I earned my Ph.D. in History of Science at Princeton University in 2020.

Photo credit: Alison Dunn Photography

Photo credit: Alison Dunn Photography