Moira Weigel

衛美蘭

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

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weigel@fas.harvard.edu

Faculty Page

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Sociotechnical Security Fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute. She writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early 19th century to the present.

Her first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016, Macmillan), countered widespread claims that the rise of mobile phones and apps were bringing about the “death of romance,” showing that modern courtship practices have consistently coevolved with consumer capitalism and gendered work.  Labor of Love has been translated into six languages and appeared in dozens of outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and  HBO.

Her second book (co-edited with Ben Tarnoff), Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020, FSG Originals), is a series of long-form anonymous interviews with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers and in-house massage therapists to Google engineers. It received positive reviews from The New York Times, Wired, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets, and was named one of Wired‘s “8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now.” It has been translated into Korean.

Her current recent research focuses on transnational online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay and China’s “four little dragons” (四小龍): Alibaba, Shein, Temu, and TikTok. She notes that despite tech competition, cross-border e-commerce (跨境電商) has made ordinary people in China and the U.S. ever more closely entangled.

She received her Ph.D. from the joint program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University.

Research Interests: Data-driven technologies or digital platforms (especially marketplace platforms and in AI), contemporary cinema and literature, and histories of translation and/as transculturation

Selected Publications: