I’m a scholar of digital media and the environment, and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. In summer 2025, I will also be a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
I draw on media theory, science and technology studies, and political ecology to think about how digital technologies are grounded in peoples' relations with the earth. I’m especially interested in how technology shapes ideas about sustainability, and in the appeal of the idea that information technologies can align with natural processes to remediate extractive and exploitative resource systems.
My current research looks at the emergence of mass timber architecture in the Pacific Northwest of North America. As managing carbon has become an imperative around which entire supply chains and manufacturing systems are remade, architectural sustainability is increasingly being reconceived as a problem in need of logistical and informatic solutions. Through fieldwork and interviews from across the supply chain for mass timber in Oregon and Washington, I look at why a movement to scale up the use of biogenic construction materials has emerged here, at how digitization in design and construction has improbably enabled the timber industry to reposition itself as both low-carbon and high-tech, and at whether this growing industry can deliver what it promises for regional forests, housing markets, and workers. I am currently working on a book about the industry, Digital Timber: Carbon, Code, and the New Logistics of Environmental Repair.
I completed my Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in 2024; I also have degrees in (environmental) history and (human) geography. Before coming back to academia for my Ph.D., I worked in education and workforce development in my hometown, Baltimore.