Adrian Johns

Mailing Address

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 45
Chicago, IL 60637

Personal Website

On Research Leave: 2012 - 2013

Field Specialties

History of science; British history; history of intellectual property; history of the book and other media.

Biography

As well as being a professor in the Department of History, Adrian Johns chairs the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. He is the author of Death of a Pirate: British and the Making of the Information Age (W.W. Norton, 2010), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 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. Johns has published widely in the history of science and the history of the book. 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.

Recent Publications

[For a complete list, see http://home.uchicago.edu/~johns/cv.htm]

Death of a Pirate: British and the Making of the Information Age (W.W. Norton, 2010).

Piracy: The intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

“Ink.” E. Spary and U. Klein (eds.), Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 101-24.

“Changes in the World of Publishing.” J. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge history of English Romantic literature (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 377-402.
“Coleman Street.” Huntington Library Quarterly 71:1 (2008), 33-54.

“The identity engine: printing and publishing at the beginning of the knowledge economy.” L. Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear (eds.), The mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation (Edita/University of Chicago Press, 2007), 403-28.

“Coffeehouses and print shops.” The Cambridge History of Science, III: Early Modern Science (ed. L. Daston and K. Park. Cambridge University Press, 2006), 320-40.

“Intellectual property and the nature of science.” Cultural Studies 20 (2006), 145-64.