Bio

I am a historian working on one of the central questions of the twenty-first century: How do societies build trustworthy knowledge for collective decision-making?

My research sits at the intersection of history, artificial intelligence, climate governance, and democratic institutions. Across these fields, I study the infrastructures that allow large societies to reason together—archives, data systems, public institutions, and the methods by which evidence becomes shared knowledge.

My work begins from a simple observation. Climate change, democratic decline, inequality, and artificial intelligence are often treated as separate problems. I believe they are manifestations of the same underlying challenge: how complex societies organize knowledge across time and coordinate action at scale.

That question first emerged for me in the archives. My forthcoming book, The War Over Rent (Dutton, 2027), reconstructs the nineteenth-century struggle that transformed housing from a private contract into a public question. Drawing on years of archival research, it recovers dozens of forgotten lives—from evicted tenants and journalists to insurgents, judges, reformers, and political economists including Thomas Robert Malthus and John Stuart Mill—many of whose stories have never before been told. Set against land struggles across the British Empire, the book follows movements that experimented with terrorism, investigative journalism, rent strikes, parliamentary politics, and, ultimately, data collection. Only late in the story do a group of women begin systematically documenting rent escalation, producing the evidence that helped secure the world’s first modern rent control law, the Irish Land Act of 1881. The book argues that data has never belonged only to states or corporations. It has also been painstakingly assembled by ordinary people seeking justice. That history continues to shape my thinking about public knowledge in the age of AI.

Across my work, I investigate how previous generations built the institutions that made collective life possible—from systems of land and water governance to the bureaucracies that maintained cities, regulated markets, and established public trust. Those historical lessons inform my research on the future of governance in an age increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence.

One strand of my research examines the history and future of international climate governance. I study the evolution of institutions governing land, water, and environmental commons while developing new data architectures for long-term climate accountability. Rather than treating climate governance as a sequence of diplomatic summits, I ask what durable information systems would enable societies to document environmental change, incorporate democratic participation, and sustain regulatory action across generations.

A second strand develops computational methods for understanding public disagreement. My current project, the Dissentometer, compares historical narratives across hundreds of language editions of Wikipedia to identify where communities converge and where they diverge in their understanding of the past. By measuring historical consensus itself, the project offers new tools for studying memory, public discourse, and the global circulation of knowledge.

These projects converge around a larger question. As large language models become central public knowledge infrastructures, they must learn not only to retrieve information but to distinguish settled knowledge from legitimate scholarly disagreement. Historians have spent centuries developing methods for evaluating conflicting testimony, weighing evidence, interpreting context, and understanding how interpretations change over time. I believe these humanistic methods are becoming essential components of trustworthy AI. My work explores how artificial intelligence can become more intellectually honest by representing uncertainty, competing interpretations, and the social structure of knowledge rather than collapsing disagreement into a single synthesized answer.

I am Professor of Data and Decision Sciences at Emory University, where I direct interdisciplinary research on AI, historical reasoning, and democratic knowledge infrastructures. Previously I taught at Brown University and held appointments at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. I was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. I am the author of The Long Land War, The War Over Rent, and, with David Armitage, The History Manifesto. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been featured by the BBC and CBC. I have voluminously podcasted, blogged, and substacked on topics as diverse as AI, the future of the university, climate governance, housing rights, and  social history for more than a decade. I have delivered keynote lectures for audiences spanning economic development, computational and digital humanities, literary studies, intellectual history, environmental history, and Irish history.

Across my research, writing, and public engagement, I argue that history is not simply a record of the past. It is a science of collective memory—and an essential discipline for designing the knowledge systems on which democratic societies and artificial intelligence will increasingly depend.