Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, 2007-2008
• Ph.D. History of Science and Technology, The Johns Hopkins University, 2007
• M.A. History, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2003
• B.A. History, Vassar College, 1996

Areas of Research

• History of Science and Technology
• United States History, 1880-present
• Business and Economic History
• History of Information and Communication Technologies
• Internet History and Policy
• Standardization History and Policy
• Maintenance and Innovation

Honors and Awards

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for “The Maintainers: Building and Sustaining Maintenance Communities,” 2018
• Mahoney Prize, Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, & Society, 2016
• Arthur L. Norberg Travel Grant, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, 2010 & 2014
• Curriculum Development Grant, National Institute for Standards and Technology, 2013
• History Fellowship, Association for Computing Machinery, 2011 & 2013
• IEEE Life Members’ Fellowship in Electrical History, 2008-2009
• The Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Processing, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, 2006-2007
• Commended Paper, International Electrotechnical Commission Centenary Challenge, 2006
• First place, World Standards Day Paper Competition, 2006

Professional Service

• Contributing Editor, Technology & Culture
• Editorial Board Member, Information & Culture: A Journal of History
• Editorial Board Member, International Journal of Standardization Research
• Editorial Board Member, Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture & Society

Selected Publications

Books

• The Innovator’s Delusion: How Our Obsessions with the New Disrupts the Work that Matters Most (Currency, 2020) - co-authored with Lee Vinsel
• Ada’s Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age (ACM Press, 2015) – co-editor with Robin Hammerman
• Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Articles

• “The Social Aesthetics of Maintenance” (with Jessica Meyerson and Lee Vinsel), American Sociological Association Culture Section Newsletter, November 2019.
• “The Joy of Standards” (with Lee Vinsel), The New York Times, February 16, 2019.
• “Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care,” in Matthew Wisnioski, Eric S. Hintz, and Marie Stettler Kleine, eds. Does America Need More Innovators? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019) - co-authored with Lee Vinsel.
• “How to Turn Maintenance into a Mindset” (with Lee Vinsel), Education Week, January 8, 2019.
• “Das Modulare und das Digitale,” Arch+ 233 (2018), 118-123.
• “Financial and Administrative Infrastructure for the Early Internet: Network Maintenance at the Defense Information Systems Agency,” Technology & Culture 59 (October 2018): 899-924 – co-authored with Bradley Fidler.
• “Silicon Valley, From ‘Heart’s Delight’ to Toxic Wasteland” (with Lee Vinsel), The Conversation, July 11, 2018.
• “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance,” Technology & Culture 59 (January 2018), 1-25 –co-authored with Lee Vinsel.
• “Hagiography, Revisionism & Blasphemy in Internet Histories,” Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society 1 (2017): 15-25.
• “Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance!” (with Lee Vinsel), The New York Times, July 22, 2017.
• “Modular Design and Standardization: Past, Present, and Future,” The ITEA Journal of Test and Evaluation 38 (March 2017).
• “Whitey on Mars” (with Lee Vinsel), Aeon, February 1, 2017.
• “Silicon Folly: The Pitfalls of Innovation Policy” (with Lee Vinsel), The Saturday Paper (Australia), Ed. No. 123, August 27 – September 2, 2016.
• “Hail the Maintainers,” Aeon (April 6, 2016) – co-authored with Lee Vinsel.
• “Histories of the Internet: Introducing the Special Issue,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 50 (May-June 2015) – co-authored with Thomas Haigh and William H. Dutton.
• “In the Shadow of Arpanet and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s,” Technology & Culture 55 (2014): 880-907 – co-authored with Valérie Schafer.
• “Using Ethical Reasoning to Amplify the Reach and Resonance of Professional Codes of Conduct in Training Big Data Scientists,” Science and Engineering Ethics (November 2014) – co-authored with Rochelle E. Trachtenberg, Gregory J. Morgan, Kevin T. FitzGerald, Jeff Collman, Lee Vinsel, Michael Steinmann, and Lisa M. Dolling.
• “The Internet That Wasn’t,” IEEE Spectrum 50 (August 2013): 38-43.
• “Modularity: An Interdisciplinary History of an Ordering Concept,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 47 (2012): 257-287.
• “‘Rough Consensus and Running Code’ and the Internet-OSI Standards War,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing28 (July-September 2006): 48-61.
• “Telecommunications Standards in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions,” The Journal of the Communications Network 5 (January-March 2006): 100-106.
• “Standardization in History: A Review Essay with an Eye to the Future,” in Sherrie Bolin, ed., The Standards Edge: Future Generations (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2005).