I am an assistant professor of digital media in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. I am interested in why and how digital technologies are developed to imitate human embodiment. I investigate both the research and development of digital technologies as well as their popular adoption, use, and resistance, and study the points of intersection between these discourses. My work often questions the impact of choices made about how the human mind/body is abstracted, measured, and quantified on the way to digitization, especially with regards to effects for people of diverse races, classes, and gender identities. My forthcoming book is a 20th century media history of voice synthesis.

My research has been funded by fellowships from the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Strong Museum of Play, Michigan Technological University’s Research Excellence Fund, the Computer History section of the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

I earned a PhD in Communication from the University of Utah in 2015. Before that I was a technology instruction librarian and head of a start-up digital scholarship lab, also at the University of Utah. I previously earned an MLIS from the University of Washington iSchool (2004) and an MA in English from Boise State (2003).

CV (updated 08/2018)