Newly Named CBI Research Fellows: Lisa Messeri, Dan Bouk, and Kenneth Lipartito
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/01/24)—The Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information and Culture is thrilled to announce the addition of three new CBI Research Fellows, Yale University Associate Professor of Anthropology Lisa Messeri, Colgate University Professor of History Dan Bouk, and Florida International University Professor of History Kenneth Lipartito. All three are incredibly distinguished scholars and academic leaders and will add greatly to our interdisciplinary institute.
Lisa Messeri, who is Graduate Studies Director of Yale’s Anthropology Department, is a leading sociocultural anthropologist. She has published some of the most important and impactful scholarly contributions to the anthropology of science and technology. Messeri is author of two phenomenal books, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (2016, Duke University Press, 2016), and just this year, In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2024). Both books offer rich ethnography while drawing from media studies, communication, history, geography, and other disciplines and theory. Messeri’s first book insightfully examines how planetary scientists engaged in humanistic “placemaking” of planets and outer space, framings consistent with and helping to enable cosmism and settler colonialism ideologies. The second book brilliantly explores how women creators of virtual reality in Los Angeles looked to virtual worlds for meaningful real world social change, and the limits of technological fixes to social ills.
In addition to her incredible books and countless, insightful scholarly articles, Misseri is an influential public intellectual. In 2024, Messeri and Princeton University Associate Professor of Psychology Molly J. Crockett, published “Artificial Intelligence and Illusions of Understanding in Scientific Research” in Nature—a magnificent and illuminating article. Messeri has also published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, Slate, Wired, CNN, and PBS.
Dan Bouk, who Chairs Colgate’s History Department, also produces deeply researched scholarship that is as interesting as it is insightful and influential. This is no small feat as he does this through deep, creative, and nuanced readings of what he terms “modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness.” He has an unequaled talent for distilling the meaningful out of the mundane. His first book is How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It is a powerful and engaging prize-winning book (Forum for the History of Science in America: Philip J. Pauly Book Prize). It focuses on the life insurance industry and big data, of actuarial science’s actuating, institutionalizing, and amplifying race and class inequalities. His second book, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the Census and How to Read Them (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2022), is one of the best works combining data, politics, technology, and social history ever published. The New York Times Book Review named Democracy’s Data as one of the “100 Notable Books of 2022.” Bouk generously gave a tremendous keynote address, drawing from the book, at CBI’s 2023 interdisciplinary symposium “Automation by Design.”
As with Dan Bouk, Kenneth Lipartito is a highly influential leading historian. His work has focused on business, technology, and social history. Lipartito is Past President of the Business History Conference, the top business history society globally. Lipartito also served as Editor-in-Chief of the top business history journal, Enterprise and Society. He has authored and edited more than a half dozen books, including multiple prize-winners. In addition to his path breaking books, Lipartito is the only business or technology historian I am aware of to publish multiple scholarly articles in the premier global history journal, American Historical Review, quite an accomplishment. And as one would expect, they are historical and historiographical gems.
Lipartito’s first book The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) is a classic in American business and technology history. It contributes so much to our understanding of technology and early corporate industrial research infrastructure and its contexts. His most recent book, Surveillance Capitalism in America, was co-edited with Information Studies scholar Joshua Lauer (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). It is a wondrous volume that looks at the long history and settings of surveillance capitalism from the early republic into the digital age—with particular focus on managers surveilling laborers and merchants surveilling customers. Lipartito and Lauer gave a highly enlightening keynote address on the topic of surveillance capitalism’s long multi-century pre-digital and digital era history at CBI’s 2020 major symposium, “Just Code: Power, Inequality, and the Global Political Economy of IT.”
Again, we welcome Lisa, Dan, and Ken, and we so appreciate them signing on as CBI Research Fellows.
Jeffrey R. Yost