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Faculty Fellow

Adrian Johns

Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Adrian Johns is the author of The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago, 2023), Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton, 2010), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009), and The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), and co-editor (with James Evans) of Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (Osiris 38, 2023, forthcoming). He has also authored dozens of papers in the histories of science, the book, media, and information. The Nature of the Book won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. Piracy won the Laing Prize and was selected as Book of the Year by the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Johns has been awarded Guggenheim, ACLS, and NEH fellowships. Educated in Britain at the University of Cambridge, he has also taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology.

For more information, please visit his faculty profile.

Topics

Project

Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet

Project Team:

Project Topics:

2018 – 2021