Faculty in the Department of History, the Data Science Initiative, and Founder/Director of the Program in Digital Humanities

Building a program in human data science at Southern Methodist University. Digital humanities; legal history; history of technology; landscape history; the history of Britain and its Empire.

I teach courses on Britain and its Empire. I am currently working on a monograph on land reform in Britain and the World from 1820. The Long Land War tells the story of global struggles over land and water since the struggles kicked off by simultaneous land reform movements and land wars in Ireland, Scotland, and India in the 1880s. It narrates how simultaneous famines and rent strikes rocked the British empire, causing a rethinking of property law within circles at Oxford and Cambridge, recently roused to contemplating the history of the European commons by archaeological finds and new evidence from the legal archives. The story then continues to the making of international land reform movements after the Second World War, where history PhD’s who had written theses on the history of the European peasant commons were recruited by the United Nations to run the Food and Agriculture Organization, which together with a variety of other small think tanks, championed the cause of international land reform even while land movements in Southeast Asia and South America were being directly suppressed by US Foreign Policy.

Beginning in the fall of 2013, I will be offering courses on landscape and capitalism, global land reform, modern world cities, and Britain and its empire. I am excited about joining one of the universities in North America with the broadest commitment to developing an infrastructure for big data and the digital humanities. I'm also tremendously excited to be joining a faculty whose undergraduates are amongst the most committed to social justice in the Ivy League.

I began work on the global history of the infrastructure state and the history of land reform, visiting archives at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Workshop on Political Economy, Indiana; the FAO in Rome; and the Ford and Rockefeller Archives. In 2012, I took Roads to Power (2012) on a book tour, giving talks on the importance of the infrastructure state in light of America's declining commitment to infrastructure for audiences at the Union League Club of Chicago and SXSW (Austin), and talking to public radio about my work. In 2012, I was awarded a Milton Award, a major research grant, to subsidize the research and writing of The Long Land War. Working with the Harvard Metalab, I also received a Google Summer of Code Intern to help build the digital infrastructure for large-scale text-corpus analysis in digital history.I am currently working on several projects, including a people's history of public space, a textbook on digital history, and a history of global land reform since 1860.

I taught courses on digital history, information revolutions, the 19th-century city, and landscape and capitalism since 1350. Many of these lectures were rehearsed in the activist spaces of Chicago, where I practiced my talks on the history of public housing and the history of property boundaries for an audience of leftists working in their communities for social change.I also prepared some of my lectures on the intellectual history of landscape as a series of essays, shared publicly at http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/. The site was prepared with the help of the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia as a resource for academics making sense of the history of landscape and contemplating the deployment of tools like GIS and geoparsing towards finding new patterns in historical data.I also became an adept maker of sauerkraut and spent many happy evenings biking on the Lake Shore Path.

I edited a prose issue of Absent that included my editorial on the Death of the Public Intellectual : http://absentmag.org/issue03/

I ran a small non-profit charged with coordinating a web 2.0 information campaign on behalf of progressive politics, especially among spiritual and religious leaders on the left.

I cofounded Topic Magazine together with David Haskell in 2001 as a journal dedicated to publishing relevant cultural analysis by 20- and 30-something public intellectuals.