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Ethan Greist

Smiling young man with dark curly hair, green eyes, and a dark olive polo shirt in front of wood paneling.
  • University of Notre Dame
  • Tech Ethics Graduate Fellow (2026-2027)

Ethan Greist is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of Notre Dame. His research sits at the intersection of technology and historical political development. His dissertation examines the clash between human agency, social structure, and material capability in the life cycle of general purpose technologies. He applies a mix of qualitative and computational methods to the study of three episodes of technological expansion and contestation in the United States: railroads, electrification, and large language models.

Greist’s master's thesis at Notre Dame examined how the shift in historical cosponsorship patterns and weakening inter-office staff mobility of U.S. Senators changed the dominant mode of national policy innovation. Before Notre Dame, Greist earned a master's degree in social science from the University of Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University, where his honors thesis examined the surprisingly mundane state-building role of the Chinese Communist Party's "Social Credit System."