Assistant Professor

E: sdick@sfu.ca
Room: K-9664

Stephanie Dick is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching are informed by her background in STS and History of Science, with a focus on computing, mathematics, and artificial intelligence since the Second World War. She is the co-editor, with Janet Abbate, of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society which is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022. Her first book project, Making Up Minds: Computing and Proof in the Postwar United States explores attempts to reproduce human intelligence, mathematical intelligence in particular, in computers and the theories of human cognitive faculties that informed these efforts. It is a book about the men who looked at early digital computers and saw themselves, and the many histories that informed that perplexing and problematic recognition. Her second book project explores the establishment of the first centralized law enforcement databanks in the 1960s, the political and technological construction of “criminality” within them, and their role in mass incarceration and ongoing racial injustice in policing. Stephanie is a co-organizer on the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power” at the University of Cambridge, she co-edits the “Mining the Past” column at the Harvard Data Science Review; she is a co-organizer of the annual SIGCIS conference; she serves on the editorial board for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; she is a member of the Scholarly Council at the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA; she is an elected Council Member for the History of Science Society, and co-chair of the Committee on Membership. Stephanie is a teacher, and Teaching Advisory Board member with the Freedom Summer Collegiate Program in Mississippi. Before joining the faculty at SFU, Stephanie was an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows.

• PhD (2015), History of Science, Harvard University 
• MA (2008), History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto
• BA (2007), History of Science and Technology and Philosophy (First Class Combined Honors), the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University

Science and Technology studies; History of Science; Mathematics; Computing; Artificial Intelligence; Critical Algorithm Studies; Policing; Labor and Automation; Historical Epistemology