Bio
My research focuses on maritime, naval, and aviation history; the global history of technology; and military historiography.
My first book was Information at Sea: Shipboard Command and Control in the U.S. Navy, from Mobile Bay to Okinawa (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Recent book chapters/articles include: “Science, Technology, and American Military History,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Military History (Oxford University Press, 2025), 353-367; “Continuity and Change Across Four Eras: The Past, Present, and Future of the History of Technology” in Proceedings of the MIT Symposium on the History of Technology: Past, Present, and Future (MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 2024), 158-172; and “Harvey A. DeWeerd and the Dawn of Academic Military History in the United States” in the Journal of Military History, 85, no. 1 (January 2021), 95-133.
Works in progress include an essay on the place of technology in the American military history survey course, an article on the benefits and pitfalls of digital history as revealed through analysis of world’s oldest extant nautical charts, and another on the U.S. Navy’s development of the Combat Information Center, 1943-1945. I am also working on a book that explores the evolution of shipboard navigational technology, from the invention of the sounding weight to the adoption of radio navigation.
Ask An Historian
What is a favorite moment from teaching?
I really enjoy the enthusiasm students show when they discover that multi-tasking and digital reading have been significantly impairing their comprehension and historical understanding. As one student colorfully wrote in a course eval: “I read the articles physical copy. The difference in my understanding of the articles was wild!”