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img_21811I am a historian of nineteenth-century American culture, science, and technology who works on knowledge production, information networks and knowledge infrastructures, histories of the future, and bureaucracy.  I earned my PhD from the Program in History, Anthropology, & STS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I am currently an associate professor in the History Department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where I teach courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, the history of science and technology, and environmental history.  I am a member of the steering committee for the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative and am currently working on a digital history project on the spatial history of nineteenth-century American meteorological infrastructure.  I am also a member of the steering committee for the Rutgers Critical AI Initiative.  My first book, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a history of forecasting that explores how the routinized predictions of everyday life functioned as new forms of knowledge and tools for risk management as late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Americans came to believe in the promise and accept the limitations of predicting the future.  I am currently researching a book project titled “Data Driven: Information and Investigation in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States.”  I tweet about the history and politics of the future as @jpietruska.