Attending to Existence in the Work of Jonathan Sterne: Lessons from the Past, Reflections for the Future
A History & Theory of New Media special event
with Carrie Rentschler, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and Associate Member of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, McGill University; Mara Mills, Associate Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication, and Director of the Center for Disability Studies, New York University; Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor, Communication, Stanford University; and Tom McEnaney, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese, and craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media, UC Berkeley
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Monday, April 19, 2027
6:00 — 7:30 PM
Eugene Jarvis Auditorium,
Grimes Engineering Center
RSVP here! Save the event to your bCal here!
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To conclude our 2026-27 season, we bring together three dear colleagues of the late Jonathan Sterne, pioneering communications scholar, whose first book The Audible Past is widely credited with inventing the field of sound studies, to reflect on his life, work, and enduring legacy. Tom McEnaney, former Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, longtime sound studies scholar, and friend and colleague of Jonathan Sterne’s, will moderate the roundtable discussion.
From the position of his closest co-exister, the widow/scholar/bandmate, Carrie Rentschler will identify key existential strands in Jonathan’s work and speak to their significance. With examples from Sterne’s “Cancer Crawl” blog series, which she’s collecting into a book, and the posthumous publication of “Sound and AI” and other works-in-progress, Rentschler will examine his work (and her own work with his work) as existential media about disability and technology, life and death, power and justice. She will explore Sterne’s deep investment in the plurality of human and non-human beings, and the ways he queried how ableist models of the human and the use and abuse of animals were built into our technologies and media systems. She will pay particular attention to his deep love for things weird, cute, and silly, which led him to write about cats and squirrels, Muzak in the Mall of America, and assistive devices he called “dork-o-phones,” alongside arresting material about living with ongoing impairment, grappling with unending fatigue, bearing witness to other’s lives, and tarrying with the nature of finitude.
From the position of friends and collaborators, Fred Turner and Mara Mills will contribute their perspectives on the far-reaching impact of Sterne’s scholarship. Turner will speak to the ways Sterne’s materialism opened the door to a new way of studying media and technology, focusing first on his analyses of bodies, listening techniques, and institutions in The Audible Past, then showing how his approach to sound can be used to study social media and even AI today, offering us a powerful toolkit for analyzing the technological past and shaping the technological future. Mills will focus on the concept of “dismediation,” a term she and Sterne coined in 2017, describing it as a method “to theorize media change and technical design from a disability studies perspective,” which urged readers to think ecologically of “disability as a constituting dimension of media, and media as a constituting dimension of disability.” Over the past ten years, somewhat to their surprise, a number of other authors elaborated the theory of dismediation, sharpening the concept and applying it to a range of media objects. Taking into consideration the crowdsourced definition that emerged, she and Sterne began working on a short book about “dismediation” in 2024, shortly before his death. She’ll discuss the dossier she is now co-editing with Sterne’s graduate student Meesh Fradkin for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, as a way to gather key examples of this work alongside a piece of Sterne's unpublished writing.
About Carrie Rentschler
Carrie Rentschler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and an Associate Member of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at McGill University. Her research focuses on feminist movement activism, social media, gender violence, technology studies, affect, chronic illness, and the politics of care and witnessing. She is author of Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and Media in the U.S. (Duke, 2011) and co-editor of Girlhood and the Politics of Place (Berghahn, 2016).
About Mara Mills
Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, a hub for public humanities and disability arts programming. At CDS, she is currently coordinating the Mellon-funded project ASAP: Access for Small Arts Partnerships. She is most recently coeditor of the collections How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025), "Disability and the History of Science" (Osiris 39, University of Chicago Press, 2024), and Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023). She is also a founding editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
About Fred Turner
Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture since World War II. He is the author of five books, including most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe.
About Tom McEnaney
Tom McEnaney works on the history of media and technology, Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, cultural analytics, and new media studies. He is the Co-Director of UC Cuba and a former Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Additionally, he is part of the leadership group of the Center for Cultural Analytics, and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and the Data Science Lab (D-Lab).
Professor McEnaney's work has appeared in diacritics, La Habana Elegante, The Journal of Musicology, PMLA, Public Books, Representations, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Sounding Out!, and other venues. His book, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas (FlashPoints at Northwestern University Press, 2017), which was shortlisted for the 2018 Modernist Studies Association's First Book Prize, investigates the co-evolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States. The book charts the rise and fall of populism and state socialism, and how authors in these countries began to re-conceive novel writing as an act of listening in order to shape the creation and understanding of the vox populi.
His second book, We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2026), co-edited, authored, and curated with Judith Peraino, celebrates the ways punks have built and documented their own misfit collectives since the mid-1970s, assembling alternative worlds of riotous music, art, fashion, and writing.
About History & Theory of New Media Lecture Series
The History & Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. Presented by BCNM, these events are free and open to the public.
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