Alex Sayf Cummings
I am a historian of law, technology, and American political culture. My work examines how the ideological transition to an “information society” reshaped American culture, economic policy, and the built environment from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. I earned my BA in History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2003, and went on to receive an MA (2005) and PhD (2009) in History from Columbia University, studying with Elizabeth Blackmar and Barbara Fields. My first book, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and has been reviewed in publications such as Paste, Blurt, Reason, Pop Matters, and Entertainment Law Review, among others.
My next project, Brain Magnet: RTP and the Idea of the Idea Economy. looks at North Carolina's Research Triangle region as a landscape of the high-tech economy of the late twentieth century. It approaches the same economic and technological shift that my first book examined through law by looking instead at local boosterism, the role of the federal government in fostering high-technology "hubs" such as the Triangle, and the changing racial and class demographics of the prosperous, sprawling metropolitan area encompassing Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham. The book is under contract with Columbia University Press.
I have been the recipient of the Torbet Prize, a Whiting Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a Dean's Early Career Award at Georgia State University, where I am currently an assistant professor of History.
My next project, Brain Magnet: RTP and the Idea of the Idea Economy. looks at North Carolina's Research Triangle region as a landscape of the high-tech economy of the late twentieth century. It approaches the same economic and technological shift that my first book examined through law by looking instead at local boosterism, the role of the federal government in fostering high-technology "hubs" such as the Triangle, and the changing racial and class demographics of the prosperous, sprawling metropolitan area encompassing Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham. The book is under contract with Columbia University Press.
I have been the recipient of the Torbet Prize, a Whiting Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a Dean's Early Career Award at Georgia State University, where I am currently an assistant professor of History.
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Books by Alex Sayf Cummings
In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight into how tech-driven development occurs and the people and places left in its wake.
Papers by Alex Sayf Cummings
In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight into how tech-driven development occurs and the people and places left in its wake.