Department of History

Mikey McGovern is Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He is a historian of computing, law, and social movements in the United States interested in how the politics of race and recognition have shaped our "information age" and what this can teach us about technology and inequality today. 

 

At Brown, he will work on his first book project, Justice in Numbers, which tells the story of how data-driven approaches to discrimination transformed civil rights law in the postwar United States. He will also teach two courses on the legal and technological construction of information networks that distribute power and mediate our relationships—whether social, political, or intimate. As an interdisciplinary scholar, McGovern hopes to collaborate with the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Data Science Institute on approaches to teaching and studying AI in society.

 

McGovern received his Ph.D. in History of Science and African American Studies at Princeton University, and comes to Brown from Yale Law School, where he was the Knight Law and Media Fellow at the Information Society Project. His research has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. He currently chairs the History of Science Society’s Forum for the History of Human Science and previously co-chaired the Graduate and Early Career Caucus.