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
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
Johns, Adrian. The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
ISBN9780226821481.
Johns, Adrian. Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
ISBN0393341801.
Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
ISBN9780226401188.
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
ISBN9780226401218.