Current Projects

My next project is a history of land use and capitalism, the story of peoples displaced by innovations in technology applied to territory, culminating in the nineteenth-century land reform movement as it spread into the global land reform movements of the twentieth century.  

I have published extensively on the history of the infrastructure state and our changing use of land in the era of capitalism.  I was a Fellow of the Commonweal Institute of Palo Alto, California, where I write about the challenges posed by a common system of infrastructure.  I was also a Mellon Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I taught digital methodologies and the history of information revolutions.   My postdoctoral research included a history of the idea of landscape, a history of financial crises linked to railways, a history of nineteenth-century heterotopias, and a short documentary project on the development crisis in the US rust belt.  Please read more under Academic Research.

Other activities include:  

• Political Editorials on Contemporary Collapse in American Infrastructure
  
• The creation of a collaborative, interdisciplinary discourse on Landscape Studies 
• Various projects about rethinking archives and publishing in the Digital Humanities
• Since 2002 I have kept a weblog about historical research, the contemporary landscape, and politics: http://landscape.blogspot.com