My current research focuses on the intertwined histories of computing and the behavioral sciences. My dissertation, Watching Feeling: Emotional Data from Cybernetics to Social Media, tells the story of how emotion was made computable. It ranges from debates around cybernetic models of emotion at the Macy Conferences, through early applications of computing to psychiatric treatment at state hospitals, to the development of empathic AI at the MIT Media Lab. The reconfiguration of emotion into data subject to algorithmic observation and intervention has ushered in a new biopolitical regime, one where emotional data create new forms of knowledge, power, and value. This deep history reveals that emotion was a technical object long before contemporary algorithms learned to recognize it. At the same time, I show that the pursuit of artificial intelligence was as an emotional endeavor from the earliest days of computer science.

I am also interested in  disability in the history of behaviorist psychology, the social integration of emerging technology, and the history of computer-mediated labor, particularly emotional and gendered labor.