I am a Career Development Research Fellow in Politics at St John’s College, University of Oxford. I study corporations and corporate power beyond the traditional political/economic divide. My research sits at the intersection of political theory, international relations and critical technology studies. In my current project, I look at how Silicon Valley technology corporations enact a kind of political power, from cloud computing to digital payment systems to outer space colonization, in both historical and contemporary perspective. I have published in the American Political Science Review and the Boston Review comparing Silicon Valley’s outer space colonization projects with the histories of colonizing corporations like the British East India Company and linking them to wider Silicon Valley political exit projects such as cyberspace, sea-steading, network states or special economic zones.
I received my PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and was a 2020 Gates-Cambridge Scholar, where my thesis titled “Silicon Valley and the State: Towards a Political Theory of Technology Corporations” was awarded the Lisa Smirl PhD Prize. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I received my BA from Stanford University in History with a minor in Human Rights and I went on to receive my MA in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice from Queen’s University Belfast as a 2017 Marshall Scholar. I am the host and producer of the podcast The Anti-Dystopians, the politics podcast about tech.
