Photo Credit: Lisa Festa
I am a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. I study how science is used to construct and contest ideas about human difference, and how such ideas become embedded in technology, law, and social policy.
Put broadly, I am interested in the history of data: the ways concepts, materials, and politics shape what counts in the social and natural world. My current project follows civil rights advocates’ efforts to measure and prove racial discrimination in U.S. courts since the 1960s. By providing a historical account of the opportunities and hazards of quantitative frameworks for racial justice, I seek to inform discussions about discrimination in our era of big data and machine learning.
I recieved my PhD in History of Science from Princeton 🐯. I live in New Haven 🍕, sing early music 🎵, and once modeled bowties ⧓.
Here is my latest CV. You can reach me at michael [dot] mcgovern [at] yale [dot] edu.