Assistant Professor Colette Perold researches the relationship between media technologies, labor and U.S. foreign policy, specifically the ways in which multinational IT companies shape U.S. foreign policy priorities in Latin America. Her current project draws from the business history of computing and political economy of media industries to analyze the relationship between the U.S.-based IT sector and U.S. foreign policy in Brazil prior to modern computing. Her research has been funded by various sources including the Hagley Library, the Tinker Foundation, and the Charles Babbage Institute, where she received the 2019-2020 Tomash Fellowship. Her article "IBM's World Citizens: Valentim Boucas and the Politics of IT Expansion in Authoritarian Brazil" won the 2021 Mahoney Prize for outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology from the Society for the History of Technology's Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society. She most recently received the 2022-2023 Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Society for the History of Technology.
Perold earned her PhD from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Prior to her PhD she worked as a labor organizer and as an editor for the NACLA Report on the Americas, a quarterly journal on Latin American politics and social movements.
