Postdoctoral Fellow
About
Mary Shi is a political and historical sociologist with research interests in state formation; political economy, particularly as it relates to land, place, and economic geography; economic sociology; science, knowledge, and technology; social theory; and culture, cognition, and materiality. Her primary research examines the role of land and infrastructure promotion in American political and economic development during the nineteenth century. This research allows her to analyze how processes of empire and Indigenous dispossession were woven into the formation of the American state and political modernity more generally. Mary's first book project, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021), was a community-based project produced with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Mary's work has been supported by, among others, the National Science Foundation, the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
