My book project, The Science of Not Knowing, offers a new history of systems theory, framing it as a response to a set of epistemic crises in 20th century technoscience. I follow the careers of several Austrian and American scientists involved in the development of systems theory across the 20th century, from interwar Vienna to the Cold War American university. In my research, I ask how technical debates about unity, wholeness, interdisciplinarity, communication, and complexity interacted with larger questions about democracy, faith, and the status of the human in (post)modernity. At the center of this project is Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a Vienna-born biologist and systems theorist whose life structures the narrative of the book project.

 

I also have ongoing research on topics including modernist urban planning, science fiction, biofeedback, and the relationship between mysticism and modern technoscience.

 

My research has been supported by the American Philosophical Association, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian American Studies, and the MacMillan Center at Yale.