Jonathan Sterne (1970-2025)
Fields of interest: sound studies; media theory and historiography; disability studies; science and technology studies; new media; music; cultural studies.
Website: http://sterneworks.org (visit for list of publications, CV (as of 2025), courses he taught, professionalization advice, etc.)
Research: At the time of his death, Jonathan and his students were working on a SSHRC-funded project entitled The New Sound and Look of Media: Artificial Intelligence and the Politics of Culture. His students and colleagues are continuing this work, examining and critiquing how AI is being used to shape the so-called “content” (Jonathan hated that word) of media, especially the look and feel of audiovisual texts. While there has been a lot of work on automating decisions, there is less critical analysis of how AI-related technologies are playing out in signal processing. Jonathan was particularly interested in working with populations affected by the actions of large media corporations, who built or were building alternatives, and who were affected by changes in the media industries that fly under the AI flag. The book project, which will be published posthumously, will also contribute to calls for more rigorous regulation of artificial intelligence and media industries more broadly. Some of this work is contemporary and ethnographic or techno-analytical; some is historical. Here’s the “pilot study” for the project. Stay tuned for the publication of The Sound of AI.
Much of Professor Sterne’s work is in disability and technology. Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment was his last book, published in 2021. It offers the beginnings of an impairment theory (to go with disability theory); a discussion of not speaking, hearing, and feeling well across chapters on voice, hearing and fatigue; and lots of talk about bodies and technologies. He described it as his “weirdest book to date.”
He also continued working in the areas of sound and/or music. At the time of his passing, he was coauthoring a book with Mara Mills that combines Jonathan’s sound and disability interests, entitled Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed. The book will offer a history of time-stretching and pitch-shifting, from blind readers in the 1930s to Auto-Tune and Ableton Live in the 2000s. An early excerpt from Chapter 1 on blind reading appeared in the PMLA here; another excerpt appeared in Triple Canopy here. Stay tuned for a posthumous publication of this co-authored book.
Student Supervisions, Mentorship and Graduate Teaching
Jonathan supervised students and postdoctoral projects in all his research areas. His advisees’ interests were – and are -- diverse, just like his own. The one thing Jonathan and his students and mentees all had in common was the belief in and enthusiasm for academic, intellectual work—reading books, talking about ideas, and doing research to discover and talk about weird and difficult to explain phenomena. He was, in his own words, “militantly agnostic on research methods” and advised people to “use what works.” Most of his students, recent and distant, are politicized in one way or another but it was not a requirement he had for working with him.
Jonathan hosted visiting PhD students from all over Europe and the Americas. His past postdocs were funded through SSHRC, FRQSC, the Mellon Foundation, sources in Brazil and Europe, and Media@McGill.
Jonathan rotated the graduate seminars he taught between courses in sound, historiography, technology, and disability. He often taught topic courses; the last one he was scheduled to teach was to be on the politics of interfaces. At the undergraduate level, he taught “Introduction to Communication Studies,” our big, required lecture course, and a seminar on disability and technology.
3rd person bio:
Jonathan Sterne’s work was concerned with the cultural dimensions of communication technologies, especially their form and role in large-scale societies. One of his major projects involved developing the history and theory of sound in the modern west. Beyond the work on sound and music, he published dozens of articles and book chapters that cover a wide range of topics in media theory and historiography; disability studies; science and technology studies; new media; and cultural studies. He also wrote on the politics of academic labor.
As a researcher, Sterne employed historiographic, philosophical and interpretive methods, long-form interviews, and ethnographic participant observation. In addition to his books and articles, Sterne published online since 1994, experimenting with multimodal and open access approaches now gathered under the “digital humanities” umbrella.
Sterne held fellowships from the Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, the Smithsonian Institution; and at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard and New York Universities, and a visiting researcher in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England and at Microsoft Research New York. His work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds québécois de recherché sur la société et la culture, the Beaverbrook Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and the Australian Research Council. He delivered over a hundred invited lectures and keynotes around the world and has been widely translated. In 2016 he won the McGill Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching at the full professor level.
Author:
Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press, 2021)
MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012)
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003)
Editor or co-editor:
The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies (Annenberg Press, 2013)
The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012)
The Bad Subjects Anthology (New York University Press, 1998)
Other affiliations:
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology
Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies
Department of Music Research
Department of Social Studies of Medicine
Media History Research Centre (Concordia University)