Glickman, Susannah

Susannah Glickman is a PhD candidate in the American History track. She has a background in mathematics and anthropology and works between the fields of science and technology studies and history, mixing archival and ethnographic methods. Specifically, she is interested in how institutions deal with the category of the future and the origins of the category “tech". Most of her research focuses on the history of quantum computation and information through the transformations in global American science that occurred at the end of the Cold War. Through this line of research she writes more broadly about the political economy of computing. She also sometimes writes about risk and uncertainty in other fields (for example, in history of economics) where those topics intersect theoretically with her interests.

Before Columbia, she got her BA from Reed College (2015) in mathematics and anthropology. She worked as a research assistant at Harvard researching the history of biomarkers (2013–2016) and continued her thesis research (2015-2016) on quantum algorithms (specifically, on optimal queries for algorithms like the dihedral hidden subgroup problem) with her undergraduate advisor Jamie Pommersheim. Her work has been supported by IEEE, the Heyman Center for Humanities, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and IBM. She is currently a Cain Fellow at the Science History Institute and the Zuckerman Dissertation Fellow.