Chair, Department of History (2022-2025)
Faculty Member, Nicholson Center for British Studies
Faculty Member, Renaissance Studies

Adrian Johns specializes in the histories of science, media, and information. His book The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America will be published by the University of Chicago Press in mid-2023. Also in 2023 will appear a volume co-edited with James Evans on algorithms and society, entitled Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (Osiris 38). He is currently working on a book about the policing of information from the Middle Ages to the present. Previously, he authored 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). 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 and ACLS 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 PUBLICATIONS

For a complete list, see CV.

“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 triptych of papers on algorithmic epistemology. Critical Inquiry 46:4 (Summer 2020), 806-12.