Sophia Goodfriend

I am the Harry Frank Guggenheim Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College and a non-resident fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. My research examines the impact of big data and machine learning on military conflict.

My popular writing on warfare and automation has appeared in The London Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, +972 Magazine, The Boston Review, among other outlets. I have a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. I recieved a Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in American Studies (summa cum laude) from Tufts University. My research has been supported by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the National Science Foundation, among other institutions. My inbox is open for commissions. 

My research and writing examines how artificial intelligence is upending what it means to wage and live with war. I leverage multi-sited and investigative ethnographic methods to foreground the human lives at stake in increasingly automated military conflicts.

I defended my dissertation,  Automating Warfare in Israel and Palestine, in the summer of 2024. Based on four years of ethnographic research with soldiers and civilians living at the cross-hairs of regional conflict, my study provides an ethnographic portrait of automated warfare’s profoundly human costs. 

My research has theoretical and practical implications. Ethnographically, I ask what unchecked developments in AI mean for the human condition. Practically, my research investigates the risks posed by new technologies while outlining how automated  systems can be implemented without eroding fundamental human rights.