Dr. Maggie Jack

Ethnographic researcher of technology and work in a global context

I am an Industry Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. I am also affiliated faculty in NYU’s Department of Anthropology.

My first book Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology recounts the history of the post-independence media sector in Cambodia. It then describes how contemporary new media workers find media artifacts from before the Cambodian war period, repair them, and disseminate them, often using social media. The book was published in the Labor and Technology series at the MIT Press (Katie Helke, editor; Winifred Poster, series editor) in May 2023 and is the winner of the Best 2024 Information Science Book award by ASIS&T. The book is available for purchase and is available open source through MIT Press’s Direct to Open initiative.

I have a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in History and Science from Harvard College. In previous lives, I worked in the international development sector and as a financial analyst in the technology-media-telecom sector in Silicon Valley.