Dr. Megan Wiessner
-
Profile
Megan Wiessner is a media studies scholar who works on questions of digital technology, environment, and culture. Her research and teaching on these topics span several areas: the social and environmental impacts of digital media infrastructures; the role of emerging media technologies in shaping ecological governance; the intertwined cultures of tech and environmentalism; and, most fundamentally, the ways digital life remains rooted in peoples' relations with the earth.
Bringing these areas together, her current book project is a study of the rise of digitally fabricated timber architecture in Western North America. The project documents how digitalization in architecture and construction has influenced the way architectural sustainability is imagined and measured, traces how this has resulted in the unlikely reinvention of timber as a climate-friendly material, and explores what these informatic and logistical approaches to sustainability mean for forests, housing, and workers.
Wiessner is also working on two new projects. The first is a study of the U.S. Forest Service’s controversial use of linear programming for environmental planning during the 1980s, and this episode’s contribution to a wider delegitimization of state planning in the United States. The second is a rethinking of automation as an environmental phenomenon, revisiting debates about technology and labor through a wider materialist lens.
Prior to joining the University of Richmond, Wiessner was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Virginia’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, an affiliate of Sloane Lab, and a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She completed her Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and holds additional degrees in history and geography.
Expand All-
Grants and Fellowships
2025 - Research Fellow, Canadian Centre for Architecture
2025 - Page-Barbour Committee Workshops Grant, University of Virginia
2022-2023 - Urban Fellowship, Wagner School of Public Policy, New York University
-
Awards
2025 - Best Dissertation Award, Digital Geographies Specialty Group, American Association of Geographers
2024 - Outstanding Teaching Award, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
-
Memberships
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Society for Social Studies of Science
Labor Tech Research Network
Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society (Society for the History of Technology)
-
Grants and Fellowships
-
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
2025, Wiessner, M. “Digital Construction Comes to the Pacific Northwest: Timber and the Landscapes of Automation.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 47(4).
2025, Wiessner, M., Kellogg, S. P., and Starosielski, N. “The Visual Culture of ‘Silicon Heartland’: Architecting Agricultural Past as Infrastructural Future.” Journal of Visual Culture 23(2): 156-167.
2024, Kellogg, S. P., Starosielski, N., and Wiessner, M. “Through the Haze: Data Centers’ Elemental Aesthetics.” Journal of Environmental Media 5 (Sensing Elementality).
2024, Wiessner, M. “The Ecologistics of Carbon Tracking: Environmental Accounting Software and Industrial Media Practices.” Journal of Environmental Media 5(2).
2024, Wiessner, M. “Webs of Care, or: Can (Thinking about) Multispecies Forests Redeem Information Technology?” Media Fields Journal 18.
Book Chapters2026, Wiessner, M., Pasek, A., Starosielski, N., and Vaughn, H. “Green Data Capitalism and its Rural Extractions." Media Rurality, ed. Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney. Duke University Press.
2026, Wiessner, M. “Making Timber “Smart”: Architecture, Technology, and Place in the Pacific Northwest.” In The Smartification of Everything, ed., Mascha Gugganig, Kelly Bronson, and Vincent Mirza. University of Toronto Press.
- Links