Sonja Rusnak
Sonja Rusnak Office: Social Science Research Building, room 334 Phone: (773) 702-3150 Email
Graduate Affairs Administrator

Contact me about PhD program requirements including the Mentored Teaching Experience (MTE) requirement; PhD admissions; PhD fellowships and job market; PhD joint degrees, and PhD alumni.

Person
David L. Goodwine Jr. Office: Social Science Research Building, room 332 Phone: (773) 702-8397 Email
Department Office Assistant

Contact me regarding Research Assistantships, PhD examination arrangements (Dissertation Defense, Proposal Hearing, PhD Field Exams), dissertation submissions, reserving the John Hope Franklin Room, facility matters, supplies, mailings.

Sheena Finnigan
Sheena Finnigan Office: Social Science Research Building, room 329 Phone: (773) 702-5961 Email
Program Administrator and Lecturer

Contact me about any aspect of the department website, social media, or news; department events planning; graduate teaching appointments; and course scheduling.

Cyndee Breshock
Cyndee Breshock Office: Social Science Research Building, room 331 Phone: (773) 702-8394 Email
Administrator for Chair and Faculty Affairs

Contact me about faculty searches; questions on other academic appointments; department space and operating budget matters; and scheduling a meeting with the chair.

Photo of Peggy Heffington
Peggy Heffington Areas of Study: Gender & Sexuality Human Rights Modern Europe United States Office: Social Science Research Building, room 225D Office hours: Autumn Quarter 2024 In person: Tuesday, and Thursday, 2:00-4:00pm Zoom: Wednesday, 1:00-5:00pm Email Interests: Modern US history; histories of women, gender, and feminism



 

Assistant Senior Instructional Professor; Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies

PhD'16 University of California, Berkeley
AB'09 Pomona College

AUTUMN QUARTER 2024
OFFICE HOURS: IN-PERSON SIGN UP LINK
OFFICE HOURS: ZOOM SIGN UP LINK

FIELD SPECIALTIES

Modern US history; histories of women, gender, and feminism

BIOGRAPHY

Peggy teaches and writes on feminism, women's movements, and motherhood in American and European history. Her first book, WITHOUT CHILDREN: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (Seal Press, 2023), explores the history of non-motherhood in light of falling fertility and rising rates of childlessness today, in the US and globally. Her current research centers on the late 20th century revival of midwifery in the United States and the place birth has occupied in American religion, politics, and culture--and on Instagram. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and she regularly appears on television, radio, podcasts, and at corporate events. Peggy received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley.
In addition to her teaching and writing, Peggy works with the Chair of Undergraduate Studies to oversee undergraduate advising, events, and curriculum in the Department of History.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (Seal Press, 2023).

"Why Women Not Having Kids Became a Panic," New York Times, May 6, 2023.
 

Photo of Adrian Johns
Adrian Johns Areas of Study: Britain Cultural Intellectual Modern Europe Science and Medicine Social History Chair, Department of History
Faculty Member, Nicholson Center for British Studies
Faculty Member, Renaissance Studies
Office: William Rainey Harper Memorial Library, West Tower, room 602 Mailbox 45 Office hours: Spring Quarter 2025 Friday, 10:00am-12:00pm or by appointment Phone: (773) 702-2334 Email Interests:

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

Allan Grant Maclear Distinguished Service Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College, Department Chair

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, NEH, and NSF 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

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.

  • Gordon J. Laing Award, University of Chicago Press
  • Book of the Year Award, American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Outstanding Academic Title Awards, Choice Magazine

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