Carolyn Bailey

Carolyn A. Bailey is the Franke Postdoctoral Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Her research focuses on media studies, visual culture, and the history of technology. She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation into her first book manuscript. Through case studies spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Proof of Life: The Biopolitics of Visual Media examines the relationships between media objects, data surveillance, and risk management to introduce the concept of “biosurveillance media”—media that track, identify, and categorize human life. She is also working on a second project that investigates artificial intelligence in relation to diagnostic and therapeutic media platforms that rely on automatic speech recognition. By analyzing audio surveillance through historical and media theoretical lenses, this project situates “machine listening” within broader twentieth-century efforts to quantify the body through biometric technology.

Carolyn holds a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University, where her work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She has taught at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2023, she co-curated the exhibit Surveillance: From Vision to Data at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Her scholarship has been published in Thresholds (MIT Press) and her criticism in New York Review of Architecture.