Muira McCammon (she/her) is an assistant professor in Tulane University’s Department of Communication and holds a courtesy appointment at Tulane Law School. Her research examines the politics of institutional memory, with an eye toward how governments and private technology companies produce, preserve, monetize, and destroy records. Bringing journalism studies into dialogue with law and critical technology studies, she asks under what political and infrastructural conditions state power becomes visible and contestable. She is particularly interested in the relationship between information policy and state violence, and in how the governance of information shapes the possibilities for democratic accountability. 

Her current research traces the destruction of federal records, including the erasure of official digital communications associated with the U.S. military’s detention operations at Guantánamo Bay. Her scholarship has appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Internet Histories. She has held fellowships with the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab, the Penn Center for Media at Risk, and, more recently, the Open University’s Centre for Protecting Women Online. She is also a former Fulbright and Beinecke Scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and a Master in Law from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an M.A. in Comparative Literature, with a concentration in translation theory, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

In Rome, she seeks to deepen her understanding of the palimpsestic dimensions of institutional memory and the ways in which authoritarianism both reconfigures and imperils government archives.