As a PhD Candidate in the history of science and medicine at Yale University, I study the history of systems theory in the 20th century, with a focus on the contributions of émigrés from Central Europe. Systems theorists, especially in the postwar years, attempted to develop scientific theories that could bridge disciplinary differences and respond to the political pressures of the 20th century. My dissertation, “The Sciences of Unity: Organicist Systems Thinking Between Vienna and the United States, 1900-1980,” follows 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.

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