Jacqueline Wernimont

Wernimont studied English and molecular biology at the University of Iowa.^[1][2] She moved to Brown University for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree and PhD in English Literature.^[3][4] When she started graduate school she worked on how postcolonial literature and the accounting of death were related.^[5] Wernimont worked on the Brown University Women Writers Project, where she began her career as a text encoder and ended up as a project manager.^[6] The Women Writers Project, which later relocated from Brown to Northeastern University, looks to reclaim the importance of pre-Victorian women's writing.^[7]

Wernimont joined Scripps College as an Assistant Professor of English, where she explored how poetries could be transformed into a 3D object.^[8] She directed the Counting the Dead project, which explored the relationship between early modern numerical and commemorative poetic technologies.^[9][10] She was appointed at Arizona State University,^[11] where she specialised in literary history and feminist digital media.^[12] She directed the graduate certificate in Digital Humanities.^[12] In 2015 she established the Center for Solutions to Online Violence.^[13][14] Together with Elizabeth Losh and Mikki Kendall, Wernimont looked at the Gamergate controversy.^[15] The trio convened the Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online conference at the Arizona State University.^[15]

She studied the history of eugenic sterilisation in California.^[16] Together with Alexandra Stern, Wernimont wrote The Eugenic Rubicon, a digital resource that compiled archival documents and data visualisation.^[17] The work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources seed grant.^[17] Indiana was the first state to pass eugenics laws in 1907, allowing the sterilisation of people deemed to be of diminished mental capacity.^[17] Wernimont has described how, with the illusion for genetic improvement, eugenics became a chance for men to control women.^[17] Between the 1920s and 1930s, sterilisation shifted from mainly men to women, with the majority from underrepresented minority groups.^[17] She found that girls as young as 13 were being sterilised, with some being described as being "in the class of the feebleminded".^[17] Eugenics laws began to be repealed in the 1970s, but non-consenting sterilisation has been reported as recently as 2010.^[17]

In October 2018 Wernimont joined Dartmouth College.^[18][19] She maintains an "angry bibliography", a collection of content produced by diverse academics.^[20] She was the chief editor of Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities.^[21] She is an active part of FemTechNet collective.^[1]

In January 2019 Wernimont's first book was published by MIT Press.^[22] Numbered Lives Life and Death in Quantum Media is a feminist media history of quantification.^[22] It includes death counts and activity trackers, quotidian media that determine who counts.^[2]