THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
University of Cambridge, PhD '92
BIOGRAPHY
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.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (Osiris 38, 2023). (Co-edited with James Evans.)
Presentation on "The Science of Reading and the Making of the Information Society," UIUC, March 2024 (video).
Presentation on “After Hours: Historia Coelestis,” Linda Hall Library, November 2022 (video).
Publication of “Piracy in the Book Trade” [essay review of Robert Darnton, Piracy and Publishing], American Historical Review 127:3 (September 2022), 1433–1435.
“Watching Readers Reading.” Textual Practice 35:9 (October 2021), 1429-52.
“Privacy.” In A. Blair, P. Duguid, A.-S. Goering, and A. Grafton (eds.), Information: A Historical Companion(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 686-93.
“The New Rules of Knowledge” (with James Evans). An introduction to a tryptich of papers on algorithmic epistemology. Critical Inquiry 46:4 (Summer 2020), 806-12.
“Lay Assaying and the Scientific Citizen.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 160, no. 1 (Mar. 2016): 18–25.
”The Coming of Print to Europe.” In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, edited by L. Howsam, 107–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“Intellectual Property.” In Globalization in Practice, edited by N. Thrift, A. Tickell, S. Woolgar, and W. H. Rupp, 183–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“The Uses of Print in the History of Science.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107, no. 4 (Dec. 2013): 393–420.
“The Ecological Origins of Copyright Skepticism.” World Intellectual Property Organization Journal 5, no. 1 (2013): 54–64.
“The Information Defense Industry and the Culture of Networks.” Amodern 2: Network Archaeology (2013).
Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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Gordon J. Laing Award, University of Chicago Press
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Book of the Year Award, American Society for Information Science and Technology
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Outstanding Academic Title Awards, Choice Magazine
The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.