A Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a doctoral candidate in Communications at Columbia University, Ben Peters studies how the concept of information changes over time, technologies, and societies, with special emphasis on Eastern Europe and America. In his dissertation "From Cybernetics to Cyber Law: the Idea and Use of Information in Twentieth-Century Transition," he situates the postwar emergence of information as an increasingly prevalent yet overlooked keyword in natural, humanistic, and social scientific discourses and argues how the varying uses and ideas behind the keyword have come to bear on and complicate pressing knowledge management issues and the modern imagination and regulation of communication. Recent work triangulating his interests in critical information studies, new media history, and comparative area studies includes, among others, "And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History" (New Media & Society), "Betrothal and Betrayal: The Soviet Translation of Norbert Wiener's Early Cybernetics" (International Journal of Communications), and a book chapter on search engines and the Muhammad cartoon controversy. He holds an MA from Stanford University and a BA, magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University, and enjoys life in Manhattan with his wife, Kourtney, and their growing family.
