Jonathan Sterne

Jonathan Sterne is the James McGill Professor of Culture and Technology at McGill University and the author of three award-winning monographs—The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012), and Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press, 2022)—along with dozens of journal articles and book chapters on sound, media, culture, technology, and disability. His work has been translated into at least eight languages.

While at Radcliffe, he is writing a book on sound and artificial intelligence. Drawing on examples across voice, environmental sound, and music, he analyzes the power relations and values built into new systems for automated listening, sensing, and sound generation.

Sterne earned a PhD in communications and criticism and interpretive theory from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a BA in humanities from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the International Communication Association. He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Microsoft Research New England, and the University of Southern California. He has also won teaching awards at each university where he’s worked.