Moira Weigel

Moira Weigel joined Harvard as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in Fall 2024. Previously, she taught as an Assistant Professor at the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, and held fellowships at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Data and Society Research Institute, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. She writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies from the late eighteenth century to the present, including books and films, drawing on sources in English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

Moira’s current research focuses on data-driven technologies, particularly social media and marketplace platforms, and on cultural and philosophical aspects of large language models. Her past books are Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (FSG, 2016) and Voices from the Valley (Macmillan, 2020), which she co-edited with Ben Tarnoff. She is a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In 2025-2026, she will host a speaker series on “Forms of Intelligence: Literary Knowledge in an Age of Writing Machines” and co-advise two postdoctoral fellows working on “AI and Society in Global China.”