Prof. William P Deringer

Professor Deringer is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. His research examines the history of those techniques and technologies of calculation that organize modern economic, financial, and political life. His work ranges widely across time, from early compound-interest tables and changing social relations in the English countryside in the early 1600s to the place of computer spreadsheets in the culture of Wall Street in the “go-go” 1980s. Deringer received his B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 2006, and his M.A. (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) in history of science from Princeton University. Before graduate school, he was an investment banking analyst at the Blackstone Group in New York. At Princeton, he was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton’s highest honor for graduate students. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, before joining the MIT faculty in 2015.