Director

Thank you for your interest in the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry (CII) and its programs the Great Works Symposium and the Custom-Designed Major. I joined the administrative staff of the Pennoni Honors College in 2005, and became associate dean and director of the CII in 2011.

I am also associate professor of history in the Department of History and Politics.  I am a historian of modern cities, technology and the environment, and public policy–with a particular focus on risk and disaster. My most recent book is: The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 

I completed my Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in 2003, after completing an M.A. in history and B.A. in history and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. 

I am also the author/editor of: Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (UPenn Press, 2009); and have published articles, essays, and book reviews in The Next American City, Isis, History and Technology, the New York Times, Public Works Management and Policy, Technology and Culture, Business History Review, Enterprise and Society, The Smart Set, and Annals of Science.