About Me

[nb: This page has not recently been updated. Please see my faculty page at the University of Western Ontario for up to date info.]

I grew up in Dundas, Ontario—the Cactus Capital of Canada, as I'm sure you're already aware—and got my BA in History from Queen's University at Kingston. I received my PhD from the Department of History at Harvard University in June 2004, held a one year research fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and joined the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario in July 2005.

I am, like the sidebar says, a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, with a special interest in the histories of technology and business in North America and the wider world. I suppose I am an Americanist first and a historian of business and technology second, though ultimately I reject that distinction. For good and for ill, business enterprise and technological innovation have been two of the great engines of American history, yet detailed study of either is often seen as distinct from the central questions of our discipline. My work seeks to eliminate these gaps.

My dissertation was pithily titled The People's Telephone: The Politics of Telephony in the United States and Canada, 1876-1926. It is a comparative and transnational history of the telephone and telephone networks in both countries. It demonstrates the fundamentally political nature of early telephone networks—the way this new technology was shaped by state structures and political struggles, and the way the dueling networks of the era embodied competing arguments about the proper organization of the economy and society. This is, I think, a fascinating story, with lessons for the political history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and also for our own era of rapid technological change.

I am very interested in comparative and transnational approaches to American history in general. My own particular perspective is the comparison of the United States and Canada, an approach that offers all manner of insights into the development and "exceptionalism," or otherwise, of each country. I'm also interested in the phenomena of "pseudoscience" and "antiscience" in America, and the changing place of technological expertise in a democratic nation, from the nineteenth-century "golden age of the crank" through the twentieth-century professionalization of science and technological research.

I am a Canadian citizen with permanent residency (green card) status in the United States. I live in Boston, Massachusetts with my wonderful wife, Lisa. And I like robots.