Miriam Posner

Miriam Posner

3047 Moore Hall

P: (310) 206-7575

W: http://www.miriamposner.com/

Book Office Hours

Curriculum Vitae

Miriam Posner

Assistant Professor

I’m interested in the way that data and technology shape people’s lives (and vice versa). To understand this, I use methods from fields like history, media studies, science and technology studies, software studies, and digital humanities. My book, Seeing Like a Supply Chain (forthcoming from Yale University Press), is a blow-by-blow account of the technology of supply-chain management (SCM), from punch-cards to neural nets. I argue that SCM is what you get when you treat the world like a computer. I’m always interested in “boring things,” like infrastructure, outmoded databases, and obsolete software, because they’re often enormously consequential to the way we live our lives. I’m also very involved in the broad field of digital humanities, which uses digital tools to explore humanities questions, and I often think and write about the combination of technology and humanities scholarship. If you’re curious about that, you might be interested in the tutorials I’ve written for my students.

Departments

Programs

Interests

Expertise

Positions and Titles

  • Assistant Professor, Information Studies and Digital Humanities

Education

  • Ph.D., Film Studies and American Studies, Yale University, 2011

  • M.Phil, Yale University, Film Studies and American Studies, 2006

  • M.A., Yale University, Film Studies and American Studies, 2007

  • B.A., History, Reed College, 2001

Awards, Honors and Fellowships

  • Residential Fellowship, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, NC, 2023–24

  • Faculty Career Development Award, UCLA, 2022–2023

  • Mellon Data and Social Justice Course Development Grant, UCLA, 2022–2024

  • Annual Teaching Excellence Award, Information Studies Department, UCLA, 2017–2018

Select Publications

  • “The Logistics of Computing” (with Matthew Hockenberry; April 2024, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing)

  • “Supply Chain.” Theory and Event. 25:1 (January 2022), 178–180.

  • “Supply Chain.” In Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (Cambridge: MIT, 2021).

  • Klein, Lauren, and Miriam Posner. “Data.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, third edition (New York: NYU, 2021).

  • “Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Information in Global Supply Chains. ” Postmodern Culture 31:3 (May 2021).

  • “The Materials at Hand” (with Alison Booth). Proceedings of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 135, no. 1 (January 2020).

  • “Digital Humanities.” In The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice, edited by Mary Celeste Kearney and Michael Kackman, 331–46. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2018.

  • “Khaki Fever, Charity Girls, and The End of the Road: Hostile Worlds of Sex and Commerce in an Early Sexual Hygiene Film,” Communicating Good Health: Movies, Medicine, and the Cultures of Risk in the Twentieth Century (University of Rochester, 2018)

  • Posner, Miriam, and Marika Cifor. “Generative Tensions: Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film.” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (September 29, 2018): 709–14.

  • “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” and “Here and There: Building Community in the Digital Humanities,” in Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2016).