Department of History | The University of Chicago

Dr. Joanna Guldi is the University of Chicago's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History. The first scholar to hold this post, she has widely discussed the nature of information revolutions, concentrating especially upon the promises and challenges posed by digital archives and publications.

Dr. Guldi's dissertation, The Road to Rule: The Expansion of the British Road Network, 1726-1848, retold the story of the road transport revolution, arguing that centralized government, not the free market, fostered the technology that connected the nation. It shows that rather than uniting the nation, roads polarized the island's regions -- English core and colonial periphery -- around the issue of who should manage the roads and which groups should pay. It finally examines the early communities of travelers who used the roads and argues for their rapid disintegration into small communities of travelers unified by common trust, demonstrating that by 1830 strangers had stopped speaking to each other on the public highway. Conflict, rather than consensus, marked each phase of the building, management, and use of the roads. Challenging the traditional account of cosmopolitan behavior, she showed how roads made strangers on the public street less sociable rather than more. New technology and questions of joint responsibility settled in the Transport Revolution made possible the Industrial Revolution and Britain's subsequent rise to power.

Her next project will narrate the story of the infrastructure state since its origins in eighteenth-century Europe. It will trace how Britain exported the conjoined mechanisms of modern civil engineering and government bureaucracy to India and Egypt and then to the new world, demonstrating the penetration of state-designed technology in the making of modern markets.

Further details about Dr. Guldi's research and other projects are available at her website, http://www.joguldi.com.

Publications

"The Origins of Eminent Domain in the English Transport Revolution 1740-1800: Impermanent Architecture and Permanent Infrastructure," in Carole Shammas, ed., Permanence and the Built Environment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (forthcoming)

"The Tangible Shape of the Nation: Maps of the Road Network, 1726-1848," in Janet Myers and Diedre McMahon, eds., Material Possessions: The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (forthcoming)

Working Paper, "The Origins of Expert Rule: British Liberalism, the Engineer, and the Local Poor, 1808-1850," 2007 Breslauer Graduate Student Symposium, UC Berkeley.

"Chaos Creation and Crowd Control: Models of riot regulation, 1700 to 2005," Critical Planning 12 (2005)

"The Uses of Planning and the Decay of Strategy," Contemporary Security Policy, 27:2 (April 2006), pp 239-286. (lead article)

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Joanna Guldi

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History
Ph.D. The University of California at Berkeley 2008
MLitt Trinity College, Cambridge 2002
AB Harvard College 2001