
Dan Bouk
Department/Office Information
HistoryContact
Dan Bouk researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. Learn more about his most recent rsearch.
For the 2025-2026 academic year, Bouk will be in residence as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. There he will be writing a book about recent NYC history that explores the question: who pays for public transit? That book, The Subway Job, will be published with MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Bouk studied computational mathematics as an undergraduate at Michigan State, before earning a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. For most of his career, Bouk's work has investigated the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. His first book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago, 2015), explored the spread into ordinary Americans' lives of the United States life insurance industry's methods for quantifying people, for discriminating by race, for justifying inequality, and for thinking statistically. His second book, Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them, published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was one of the New York Times' 100 notable books for 2022. In an age when we often hear that good governance requires that we depend on good data, it is crucial that everyone (and not just those in quantitative fields) understand and can work to improve the processes that make data from people. Democracy's Data is a history of the 1940 census that will prepare its readers to examine and critique the data-driven systems that surround us. Bouk blogs about his on-going research at shroudedincloaksofboringness.com and (more often) through his newsletter, Shrouded and Cloaked.