About

I am an associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Most of my research is about money and other communication technologies.

My book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media was released from Yale University Press in August 2020. My co-edited book, Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff  was published by MIT Press in April 2017. 

I recently released a major research report on the warning signs and ways forward for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which was conducted in collaboration with the MIT Digital Currency Initiative and fudned by the Gates Foundation. I am also writing a book about scams.

I was a 2020-2021 Berggruen Fellow, 2021 Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advance Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Previously, I was a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I received a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California and an SM in Comparative Media Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Watch me give the annual Media and Communications lecture at the UAL LCC. Here are a couple of short pieces that are good introductions to some of my work: Bitcoin as Meme and a Future, Is Venmo a Social Network? (video) and A Cashless Society? (video).