Jacob Bruggeman is a historian of intellectual history, political economy, and technology in modern America. His research investigates how emergent digital technologies and their users shaped—and were shaped by—changing ideas of governance and citizenship in the United States. By analyzing the rise of hacker communities and the integration of their practices into the mainstream, Bruggeman’s work explains how new forms of technical expertise have both challenged and reinforced political order since the mid-twentieth century. In writing and teaching alike, Bruggeman foregrounds how technology interacts with civic life.

Bruggeman is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University and the Ambrose Monell National Fellow in Technology and Democracy at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. His dissertation project, Securing the System: Phone Phreaks, Computer Hackers, and Political Order, 1963–2013, tracks telephone and computer hacking’s transformation from its anti-establishment roots to normalization in business, government, and the professions. By tracing the evolution of hacker politics—from rebellious, countercultural origins to incorporation within national security agencies and major corporations—his research offers a fresh account of how technical subcultures became central to American policy, law, and public debate about computerized society. Securing the System challenges conventional narratives of co-optation and neoliberalization, arguing instead that the meaning and significance of hacking have been continuously renegotiated by policymakers, corporate managers, journalists, and hackers themselves. Through this lens, Bruggeman reveals how computer networks and the people who built and subverted them fundamentally altered the boundaries of expertise, regulation, and American political imagination.

He has academic articles under review at Modern American History and Journal of Policy History. His scholarship was published most recently in the Middle West Review and Interfaces. Outside his dissertation, he is co-editing Beyond Rust: The Post-Industrial American Midwest in Historical Perspective. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Association for Computing Machinery, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, among others. An engaged teacher and public scholar, Bruggeman has designed and taught courses on the history of technology, political thought, and digital culture at Johns Hopkins and George Washington University.

Bruggeman holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, Darwin College, and an M.A. and B.A. from Miami University.