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Dan Bouk

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Dan Bouk

Professor of History; Chair, Department of History

Department/Office Information

History
314 Alumni Hall

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Dan Bouk researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. For the most recent info on his research, click .

Bouk studied computational mathematics as an undergraduate at Michigan State, before earning a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. His work investigates the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human.  His first book,  (Chicago, 2015), explored the spread into ordinary Americans' lives of the United States life insurance industry's methods for quantifying people, for discriminating by race, for justifying inequality, and for thinking statistically. His new book, , published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was one of the New York Times' 100 notable books for 2022. In an age when we often hear that good governance requires that we depend on good data, it is crucial that everyone (and not just those in quantitative fields) understand and can work to improve the processes that make data from people. Democracy's Data is a history of the 1940 census that will prepare its readers to examine and critique the data-driven systems that surround us. Bouk blogs about his on-going research at .

  • Michigan State University, BS (2002)
  • Princeton University, MA (2006), PhD (2009)

Dan Bouk, (New York: MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).

Dan Bouk,  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) [Now in ]

Selected Interviews

  • VIDEO: with for the US National Archives
  • VIDEO: with
  • VIDEO: with talk about partners in historical census records in a conversation highlighting the sources teachers can use in their classrooms or consult at the NYPL.
  • with as they talk about the craft of writing history
  • with host of PBS's Genealogy Roadshow
  • as they talk about the 1950 census and US history, on San Francisco's KQED
  •   an interview with Rachel Hooper at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
  • with 
  • with 
  • with Brian Tarran in Significance ()
  • in Journal of the History of Ideas podcast on 

 

Magazine and Newspaper Reviews or Related Pieces

  • excerpted for WIRED.
  • excerpted for LIT HUB.
  • written for WIRED.
  • NY TIMES review of Democracy's Data:
  • WASHINGTON POST review of Democracy's Data:
  • ATLANTIC MONTHLY: one of
  •  by Dan Bouk in Circulating Now (featuring a hernia map!)
  •  by Dan Bouk in Le Monde diplomatique (in , in , in /)
  • in 
  • in 
  • cited in New York Times by Rachel Swarns
  • quoted in Time by Olivia Waxman

Academic Reviews

  • in  by 
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  • in  by 
  • in  by 
  • in J by 
  • in  Science, Technology, & Human Values (2016) by  and 
  • in  by 
  • in  by 
  • in  by Daniel. C.S. Wilson
  • in  by 
  • in  by 
  • in  by 
  • in  by Frank L. Slesnick
  •  S-USIH by Andy Seal : "Bouk’s work is an intellectual history of capitalism...he carries it off with a poetic verve and elegance that transcends its material, expressing not only the inner logic of capital but also its hidden melodies, little patches of fancy and wonder that defy the Weberian gloom of iron cages and profit motives."
  • with Kevin Ackermann and danah boyd. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2022.
  • . New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2021.
  • With danah boyd. Knight First Amendment Institute 18 March 2021
  • Isis 112, no.4 (2021): 804-806.
  • "Quantification.” In Information: A Historical Companion. Edited by Ann Blair, et. al., 724-727. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
  • Isis 111, no.4 (2020): 783-786.
  • Harvard Data Science Review 2, no.2 (2020)
  • D. Bouk,   Modern American History 1, no. 3 (2018): 321-342.
  • “Women Who Worked with Documents to Rationalize Reproduction.” In Working and Knowing with Paper: Towards a Gendered History of Knowledge, edited by Carla Bittel, et. al. 193-207. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.
  • D. Bouk, “The Fall of the US National Data Center and the Rise of the Data Double.” 48, no. 5 (2018): 627-636.
  • D. Bouk,  Osiris 32 (2017): 85-106.
  • D. Bouk,  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 4 (2012): 329-339.
  • D. Bouk,  Enterprise and Society 12, no. 4 (Dec. 2011): 717-731.
  • D. Bouk and D.G. Burnett, "Knowledge of Leviathan: Charles W. Morgan Anatomizes His Whale," Journal of the Early Republic 27(Fall 2008): 433-466.
  • D. Bouk, "Drought and Famine: What the Past Teaches Us to Fear Most about Global Climate Change,"(a review) The American Scholar (Spring 2008): 133-136.
  • Faculty Fellow at 2019-2021
  • Camp Counselor,  at Cornell University, 2016 (& I was a camper in 2015!)
  • Member of the  and the  at Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Dept. II
  • One of the New York Times's for 2022
  • Winner of Philip J. Pauly Book Prize from Forum for the History of Science in America (2015)
  • Honorable Mention, Annual Book Award for Society for U.S. Intellectual History (2016)
  • , Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) 2012-2013
  • Phi Eta Sigma Professor of the Year, vlog, 2010-2011
  • Krooss Prize, Business History Conference, 2011
  • , Forum for the History of Human Sciences, 2010
  • Robert Hoffman Scholar, Princeton University, 2008
  • Porter Ogden Jacobus Honorific Fellowship, Princeton University, 2008
  • Honorable Mention, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2004, 2005, 2006
  • Andrew Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, 2004