Jonathan Sterne, Media Historian and Theorist, and Leading Figure in Sound Studies, Passes Away

Jonathan Sterne, whose first book The Audible Past largely invented the academic field of “sound studies” in 2003, passed away yesterday, March 20th. Sterne, the James McGill Professor of Culture and Technology at McGill University, gave several invited lectures at Berkeley, and was a key interlocutor, mentor, and friend to many faculty and students here.

Jonathan approached academia by constantly placing the friend, the giver and the mentor on par with his brilliance as a scholar. His scholarship was characterized by a seemingly limitless generosity and willingness to listen to the new. He forever changed the types of questions we ask around sound and technology and disability studies. Jonathan’s relationship to disability studies came through both scholarship and personal experience. He detailed his own treatments for thyroid cancer in blog posts that could be simultaneously moving and funny. (A U.S.-born academic who spent most of his professional life teaching and living Montréal, his sense of humor comes through even in the title of the blog on his Sterneworks website: “Super Bon! Naturalized, but not Natural.”) His wife, bandmate, and fellow McGill professor Carrie Rentschler described him in a memorial post as someone with “a palpably joyous way of being in the world,” “the most optimistic person I've ever known, finding new possibility in the worlds we can build with one another, especially in and alongside movements. He also saw possibility in the small adjustments people make in their lives to persist, including the strategies he (and we) created to find joy and purpose in the midst of his sickness and hurt.” In a review of Jonathan’s third book, Diminished Faculties, Hannah Zeavin, Assistant Professor of History and New Media at Berkeley, wrote, “This definitive book is also Sterne’s personal story of living in the matrixes of illness, impairment, and disability, in the materiality of their experience as well as the cultures that contain and produce those experiences… Throughout Diminished Faculties, Sterne troubles the binary of disabled and abled body/mind by putting disability into a constellation with impairment and illness. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne argues that some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others are marked as problems… Considering impairment and disability as a norm is a revision that Sterne requires of his reader, broadening our working understanding of the built environment.”

It is precisely this capacity to reorganize our thinking with the aim of opening us to the world that characterized Jonathan’s life: his teaching and mentorship of students and junior colleagues, the blog he wrote to show those dealing with cancer that they weren’t alone, the publishing series he co-directed with Lisa Gitelman at Duke UP to elevate the work of scholars he believed in, and the hundreds if not thousands of hours of invisible work, behind the scenes, reading manuscripts, offering advice, inspiring people to bring more joy into the world with a righteous sense of struggle. When the pandemic sent us all indoors and classes online, Jonathan wrote a detailed blog post to explain how to produce higher quality sound recordings for classes with some simple techniques (hang a blanket on the wall above your computer). It was straightforward, it was necessary, it was funny. Jonathan's generosity was felt far and wide, helping faculty and students he never knew.

As his colleagues, students, and friends, and as his readers, audiences, and listeners, we are deeply grateful to Jonathan for the unmeasurable impact he has had on our lives. We will carry the memories and lessons on with us, hoping to relay that sense of possibility in the worlds we can build with one another. We will miss him dearly and send our condolences to his loved ones and especially to his wife Carrie Rentschler.

Ana María Ochoa

Tom McEnaney

Nicole Starosielski

Hannah Zeavin