I am currently a Lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard. I am a historian studying the relations between industry and environment, and the history of technology of visual culture. I try to think through how cultures celebrating abundance and accumulation emerged across the 20th century alongside the intensification of industrial production.
Right now I am at work on a book that traces how moving images came to be so widespread in early 20th century America—a development that occurred through extractive and industrial processes on a global scale. This book, titled Seeing Through Silver, is a history of celluloid, the substance necessary to the mass distribution of moving images until the middle of the 20th century. Reconstructing the physical, intellectual, and political work needed to make cinema possible, this history shows how one strand of visual culture in the 20th century was realized through industrial and cultural struggle over a substance that resisted its own incorporation. I am also beginning work on a history of the byproduct as an industrial category.
I received my PhD in History from Rutgers, where I was a Warren and Beatrice Susman Dissertation Completion Fellow, as well as graduate fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. I also organized the Marxism & Materialism Working Group at the Center for Cultural Analysis. Outside of the university, I have written essays for The Awl, as well as comedy pieces for newyorker.com. I occasionally DJ on the radio or at parties for my friends. My research has been supported by the Science History Institute, the British Library, the Hagley Museum and Library, Harvard University, and the History Department at Rutgers–New Brunswick. I received my AB in History & Literature from Harvard.