Postdoctoral Research Fellow
About
Kat Brewster is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information. Dr. Brewster is an information studies scholar, whose research focuses on how communities disproportionately affected by the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States used nascent networking technologies to facilitate sociality, activist organizing, and exchange lifesaving information. Her ongoing work looks at: (1) the role of computing in the developing biomedical discourse around HIV/AIDS, (2) the archives that maintain digital records from this period today, and (3) the ways in which queer and trans communities make strategic use of technologies to tend to their health and wellbeing.
Dr. Brewster received her PhD in Informatics from the University of California, Irvine. At the University of Michigan, she works with Dr. Oliver Haimson to research and develop technologies that better serve trans communities as they envision transition. Her book project, Surviving Online, explores LGBTQ+ digital recordkeeping practices and community archive efforts, from the 1980s to present day.
