Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Mikey McGovern is Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He is a historian of computing, law, and social movements in the United States, and is interested in how the politics of race and recognition have shaped our “information age” and what this can teach us about technology and inequality today. His research has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. At the Cogut Institute, he will work on his first book project, Justice in Numbers, which tells the story of how data-driven approaches to discrimination transformed civil rights law in the postwar U.S., He will also teach a lecture course on the legal and technological construction of information networks that distribute power and mediate our relationships — whether social, political, or intimate. He received his Ph.D. in History of Science and African American Studies at Princeton University, and comes to Brown from Yale Law School, where he was the Knight Law and Media Fellow at the Information Society Project.