“The Production and Circulation of Knowledge in the Age of Google”

Siva Vaidhyanathan (Ph.D. Texas 1999) is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also teaches at the School of Law. A cultural historian and leading expert on intellectual property, he has gained prominence as an outspoken adversary of the Google Books scanning project. He is the founder of Critical Information Studies, a transdisciplinary field that interrogates the cultural, political, social, and economic consequences of global flows of information. Prof. Vaidhyanathan is the author of The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) (U of California P, 2011) and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York UP, 2001) as well as the editor of Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (with Carolyn de la Peña, Johns Hopkins UP, 2007). He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book and has contributed on media and cultural issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Salon.com, National Public Radio, and MSNBC.

Personal website at the Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia