Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: 19th-c. U.S. culture, science, technology, forecasting, knowledge production

About Me: I am a historian of nineteenth-century American culture, science, and technology who works on knowledge production, information networks and knowledge infrastructures, histories of the future, and bureaucracy. I earned my PhD from the Program in History, Anthropology, & STS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I am currently an assistant professor in the History Department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where I teach courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, history of technology, and environmental history. I am also a member of the steering committee for the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative and am currently working on a digital history project on the spatial history of nineteenth-century American meteorological infrastructure. My first book, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a history of forecasting that explores how the routinized predictions of everyday life functioned as new forms of knowledge and tools for risk management as late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Americans came to believe in the promise and accept the limitations of predicting the future. I am currently researching a new book-length project on “Paper Trails: Paperwork, Bureaucracy, and Investigation in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century United States.”

Recent Publications: Publications

Book

Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Articles & Book Chapters

“‘A Tornado is Coming!’: Counterfeiting and Commercializing Weather Forecasts from the Gilded Age to the New Era,” Journal of American History, forthcoming Dec. 2018.

“Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital: The Meteorological Infrastructure of American Empire in the West Indies,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 4 (2016): 418-45.

*Awarded Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Best Article Prize (2018)

“‘Cotton Guessers’: Crop Forecasters and the Rationalizing of Uncertainty in American Cotton Markets, 1890-1905,” in The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49-72.

“U.S. Weather Bureau Chief Willis Moore and the Reimagination of Uncertainty in Long-Range Forecasting,” Environment and History 17 (2011): 79-105.

Media Coverage: https://jhiblog.org/2018/04/25/roundtable-podcast-on-finance/