Assistant Professor
About
Mary is a political and historical sociologist with interests in political economy; science, knowledge, and technology studies; social theory; and public sociology. Her work puts land at the center of American state formation to rethink the origins of political and economic modernity. More specifically, she studies the evolution of land policy and large scale infrastructure projects such as the Erie Canal and first transcontinental railroad to demonstrate how processes of Indigenous dispossession, land speculation, and political exclusion were foundational in establishing the American administrative and developmental state, stimulating American economic growth, and establishing a model of infrastructure-led growth that has since gone global. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Settlers' Republic: Land, Infrastructure, and the Emergence of New Technologies of Government in the United States, 1789-1862.
Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and more. Mary's research and writing have appeared in venues such as Politics & Society, ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies, Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, and the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Her first book was Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021), an atlas, data analysis, and storytelling project co-produced between the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and dozens of community contributors that analyzed the Bay Area’s transformation as a knowledge economy hub and the new geographies of opportunity and precarity that resulted.
