Adrian Johns (academic)

Adrian Dominic Sinclair Johns (born 19 October 1965[1]) is a British-born academic. He earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992.[2] He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2001,[3] and was appointed the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History.[4] He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012.[5]

Johns is best known for his works on the history of information, particularly The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making[6] and Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.[7]

Johns met Alison Winter at Cambridge in 1987, and the two married in 1992.[8] She died in 2016.[9]

Eisenstein-Johns Debate

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In 2002, Johns was involved in a debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein in the American Historical Review over the degree to which printing was necessarily an agent of change (which Einstein had argued) or, as Johns claimed, a vehicle of change which carried messages that were mostly shaped by outside social forces.[10][11]

Selected bibliography

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  • Johns, Adrian. The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. ISBN 9780226821481.
  • Johns, Adrian. Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. ISBN 0393341801.
  • Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN 9780226401188.
  • Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 9780226401218.

References

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  1. ^ "Adrian Johns Curriculum Vitae". University of Chicago. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  2. ^ "Adrian Johns". University of Chicago. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  3. ^ "In Memoriam: Alison Winter". History of Science Society. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  4. ^ "Adrian Johns". Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  5. ^ "Adrian Johns". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  6. ^ Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226401218.
  7. ^ Johns, Adrian (2010). Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226401188.
  8. ^ "Remembering Alison Winter". University of Chicago. 16 November 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  9. ^ "Alison Winter, AB'87, historian of the mind, 1965–2016". 23 June 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  10. ^ Eisenstein, Elizabeth (2002). "An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited". American Historical Review. 107 (1): 87–105.
  11. ^ Johns, Adrian (2002). "How to Acknowledge a Revolution". American Historical Review. 107 (1): 106–125.