Charli is interested in the history and political economy of communication technology.
Her dissertation looks at the postwar history of international telecommunication governance to demonstrate how competing political economic ideas and anti-imperialist projects were expressed through technical regulation. She focuses on the management of two resources that remain at the heart of global communications systems: orbital space for satellites and electromagnetic spectrum for wireless communications. The dissertation traces how political and legal concepts were debated in the UN's International Telecommunication Union by diplomats, engineers, and scholars seeking to rectify global economic inequalities.
Her research is supported by fellowships and grants from the Linda Hall Library, Association for Computing Machinery History Committee, History and Political Economy Project, Remarque Institute, and the Urban Democracy Lab.
Selected Publications
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
“The Capitalist and Colonial Logics of Rowland Hill’s Postal Reforms: Terra Nullius, Uniform Pricing, and ‘Conveyance at the Lowest Rate,’” Monde(s) Histoire, Espaces, Relations, no. 26: (September 2024).
“Railroad Luxemburg: Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Infrastructure and its Consequences for a Public Service Internet,” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 22, no. 1 (April 2024).
Book Chapters
“Anticolonial World-Making: Racial Justice and Global Communication Governance,” co-authored with Paula Chakravartty in Handbook of Media and Communication Governance by M. Puppis, R. Mansell & H. Van den Bulck, eds. (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024).
Forthcoming, “Visual Contestation Over ITU’s Mandate at the Golden Antenna Film Festival, 1971-1991,” in Media and the Global Cold War: Internationalisms, Infrastructure, and Technopolitics Across the Three Worlds. R. Djagalov and A. Rajagopal, eds (University of Illinois Press).
Public Scholarship
Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves, Co-curator of exhibit and co-author of zine about Low-Power FM and community radio at Interference Archive in Brooklyn, NY (2019).
“RadioShack Sucks: The rise and fall of the ‘gripe site,’ and the corporate enclosure of the web,” Logic Magazine, Failure Issue (August 2018).
"Kill My ISP." Mask Magazine, Autonomy Issue (February 2018).