Laura Kurgan
Associate Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Laura Kurgan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Center for Spatial Research and the Visual Studies curriculum. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013).
Laura Kurgan
Associate Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Laura Kurgan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Center for Spatial Research and the Visual Studies curriculum. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013).
Her work explores the ethics and politics of digital mapping and its technologies; the art, science and visualization of big and small data; and design environments for public engagement with maps and data. From 2004 - 2015, she founded and directed the Spatial Information Design Lab at GSAPP. The SIDL "Million Dollar Blocks" project is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and her work has also been shown at Palais De Tokyo and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, MACBa in Barcelona and the ZKM in Karlsruhe. In 2009, Kurgan was awarded a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship.
Working Group Affiliation
Data Algorithms and Social Justice, Project Director
Nikita Shepard
Nikita Shepard (they/them) is a PhD student in history at Columbia, exploring gender and sexuality, LGBTQ communities, social movements, data and surveillance, and radical politics in the twentieth century United States and beyond.
Ph.D. candidate, History, Columbia University
Nikita Shepard (they/them) is a PhD student in history at Columbia, exploring gender and sexuality, LGBTQ communities, social movements, data and surveillance, and radical politics in the twentieth century United States and beyond. They serve as the graduate intern for the Lehman Center for American History and an affiliate of the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities, and have worked for the Center for Spatial Research and the Columbia Oral History Archives. They founded the "Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice" working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference in 2019, and hold a position as an Oral History Fellow for the Digital Ethics and Governance working group at the Jain Family Institute.
Working Group Affiliation
Data Algorithms and Social Justice, Graduate Director
Dennis Yi Tenen
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
His teaching and research happen at the intersection of people, texts, and technologies. Tenen received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University under the advisement of Professors Elaine Scarry and William Todd. A co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, he is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation(Stanford University Press, 2017).
Dennis Yi Tenen
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His teaching and research happen at the intersection of people, texts, and technologies. Tenen received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University under the advisement of Professors Elaine Scarry and William Todd. A co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, he is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation(Stanford University Press, 2017). His recent work appears on the pages of Modern Philology, New Literary History, Amodern, boundary2, Computational Culture, and Modernism/modernity on topics that include literary theory, the sociology of literature, media history, and computational narratology. His next book concerns the creative limits of artificial intelligence.
Working Group Affiliation
Data Algorithms and Social Justice, Project Director