I am a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In Fall 2016, I will join the Media Studies department at the University of Virginia as an assistant professor.
Most of my research is about money and other communication technologies. In 2015, I completed my PhD in communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where I was the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication, Technology and Society Fellow to Manuel Castells. My dissertation looked at money as communication, both in terms of information transmission and as a vector of relations, memory, and culture. It included chapters on the history of public and private visions of payment in the United States, frequent flyer miles and other "alternative" currencies, transactional data and privacy, and ideological and technological tensions around Bitcoin.
In 2009, I completed a masters in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My thesis was on regimes of ownership and authorship in fashion-- that is, fake bags.