Jamie Pietruska graduated from Brown University with an A.B. in English and American Literature and the History of Art and Architecture, and she worked as a secondary school teacher of literature and writing before coming to MIT. She is primarily interested in nineteenth-century American technology and culture, the relationship between institutional and vernacular science, and technology and science in public discourse.
Jamie Pietruska's dissertation is a cultural history of prediction in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through studies of weather prediction, agricultural and economic forecasting, utopian literature, and fortune-telling, her dissertation examines the shifting economic values and cultural meanings of prediction as well as broader epistemological questions pertaining to conceptions of uncertainty, the future, and modernity.
American history and literature; history of technology; nineteenth-century communication technologies and information networks
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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