About
Fields of Study
- 20th cent. American History
- Science, Technology, and Society
- Outer Space ✨🚀👨🚀🌒✨
I'm a historian of 20th century American science, technology, and poltical economy.
My dissertation looks at the rise and fall of the American space program from its beginning in the late 1950s to the permanent stagnation of space funding by the late 1970s. It asks why NASA leaders understood the decline of the agency as being rooted in the collapse of the American belief in the future. As NASA administrator James C. Fletcher put it in 1974, Americans had come since the moon landing to “discount tomorrow,” prioritizing “near-term relief, immediate income, [and] current leisure” over “a national plan in the national interest,” like space exploration. Seeking to understand these claims, I reconstruct the different ways NASA sought to forge a relationship with the American future, from first setting out on a grand quest for interplanetary space colonization in the wake of Sputnik-1, to then—as the political winds shifted in the late 60s and 70s—scrambling to reorient the space program around a future of producing short-term “returns on investment.” At core, I argue that the rise and fall of the Space Age is a story of a deep shift in the political economy of the United States and its orientation to the future, one rooted in the changing shape of the Cold War, technological innovation, and the responsibilities of the state to bring about social progress. My research looks to reconstruct a broad social history of the American space age, looking not only at the long-term plans and lofty dreams of NASA planners, but also the ways that aerospace contractions, unionized space workers, and even American consumers understood and sought to remold the national future in space.
You can find a (somewhat dated) presentation of part of my research here.
I am honored this year to be an AHA-NASA Fellow in Aerospace History which has allowed me to be based partly in Chicago and partly in Washington, DC where I was a resident at the Kluge Center. This year I was also the recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Scholar Award in Honor of Robert M. Teeter and the Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History. This past summer I was a fellow at Middlebury's Monterey Symposium in Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey and before that I was a Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellow with the National Humanities Alliance where I helped advocate for the humanities in higher education. Previously I was also a Visegrad Fellow at the Open Society Archivum in Budapest, which set me on the track of being a historian of space and the Cold War. I have been supported in my dissertation research by fellowships from Georgia State University, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the FLAS Program, my department, and the University of Michigan.
I also work alongside Professors Howard Brick, Paul Le Blanc, and Brian Whitener on a (massive!) historical document collection callled Independent Marxism in the American Century, four volumes of which are forthcoming with Haymarket Books and Brill.
Before Michigan, I lived in Budapest, Hungary where I received an MA in Comparative History and Jewish Studies from Central European University (now unfortunately forcibly exiled to Vienna). At CEU I completed a thesis entitled "Toward the Jewish Revolution: Yiddish Anarchists in New York City, 1901-1906," which traced how Yiddish radicals at the turn of the century went from rejecting to embracing ethnic Jewish politics between the assassination of President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 to the wave of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian empire around the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. It won the Peter Hanak Prize for Best Thesis and part of it was republished in With Freedom in My Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism, eds. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer (University of Illinois Press, 2023). That project was supported by CEU and by the Ruth B. Fein Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society.
In my sparetime I enjoy fried chicken and dive bars that struggle to pass health inspections.
If you are an incoming or perspective graduate student, please feel free to reach out to me to talk about the university, Ann Arbor, the STS program, the graduate student union (GEO 3550), or local chicken joints and dive bars.
