Ted Striphas

Academic Passion: Examining the relationship of language, technology and daily life, and proudly chairing the Department of Media Studies.

Professor Ted Striphas studies the history, culture and politics of technology, focusing on the relationship between emergent technologies and patterns of social and linguistic change. His research and teaching are at the intersection of cultural studies, communication, the digital humanities, and science and technology studies. Striphas holds a master’s and a doctorate in communication studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelor’s in communication from the University of New Hampshire.

Striphas’ first book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2009), analyzed the book publishing industry’s decisive role in creating a modern, connected consumer culture in the United States. In addition to being widely reviewed, it won the Book of the Year Award from the National Communication Association’s Critical-Cultural Studies Division. His second book, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet (Columbia University Press, 2023), is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled in language long before the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. The book, along with the research leading up to it, was instrumental in establishing “algorithmic culture” as both an object of study and a conventional turn-of-phrase within the English-language lexicon.

Striphas’ research has appeared in leading scholarly journals including Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, New Media and Society, New Formations and Television and New Media.

His work has been translated into German, Italian, Korean and Turkish. In addition to sitting on multiple book and journal editorial boards, Striphas serves as co-editor of the field-defining journal, Cultural Studies.

He is a regular source for and contributor to local, national and international news media. His appearances include the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Times Higher Education Supplement and The Washington Post.