Guest lecture by Professor Sarah Igo
Andrew Jackson Chair in American History, Professor of Law; Professor of Political Science; Professor of Sociology; Dean of Strategic Initiatives, College of Arts and Science
Abstract:
This talk explores the U.S. Social Security number as a useful object for reflecting on the ways Americans across the last century imagined their affiliation to the U.S. state—as well as to their own “personal” data. Beginning in 1936, the SSN was affixed to more and more American lives in order to administer social benefits, spurring new uses of punch cards and filing systems as well as novel dilemmas about the housing and dissemination of personal information. The twists and turns of this history reveal the unanticipated outcomes of creating a new identification system in the 1930s—as well as the fraught relationship among technical infrastructures, data privacy, social imaginations, and modern citizenship.
Please register for in-person or online participation here
About Sarah Igo:
Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History and the Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the College of Arts and Science. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Professor Igo’s primary research interests are in modern American cultural, intellectual, legal and political history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere.
Igo’s most recent book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), traces U.S. debates that reshaped the meanings of privacy, beginning with “instantaneous photography” in the late nineteenth century and culminating in our present dilemmas over social media and big data. Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society, the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, The Known Citizen has been warmly reviewed in venues such as The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, Dissent, and the New York Review of Books. The book was honored for “Exemplary Legal Writing” by the Green Bag Reader & Almanac and named one of the “Notable Non-Fiction Books of 2018” by the Washington Post.
Explore Sarah Igo’s scholarship here https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/sarah-igo/