Faculty

Mara Mills

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Phone: (212) 992-7325
Email:

Photograph of Mara Mills

Mara Mills works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. Her research and teaching interests include communication history, telephone and mobile media studies, science and technology studies, and disability theory. Her current book project traces the historical associations between deafness and communication engineering in the telephone system. Other projects include: a history of talking books, reading machines, and print disability; a collaborative study of the history and politics of "miniaturization" in the electronics industry. Mills has lectured widely, including recent talks at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan); the Insitute of Media Archaeology at Kulturfabrik Hainburg (Austria); CNRS/Université Paris Diderot; and the Stanford Seminar on Science, Technology, Society. She comes to NYU after two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.


Degrees Held

  • Ph.D. Harvard University
    History of Science
  • M.A. Harvard University
    Biology
  • M.A. University of California, Santa Cruz
    Education
  • B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz
    Literature
  • B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz
    Biology

Selected Fellowships and Awards

  • 2012: Outstanding Faculty Award, NYU Steinhardt Undergraduate Student Government
  • 2011: Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar, Media@McGill
  • 2010: Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies
  • 2010: ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (with Cyrus Mody and Patrick McCray)
  • 2010: "Critical Disability Studies" Residential Research Fellowship, University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)
  • 2009: Schachterle Essay Prize, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts
  • 2009: Population Health Research Grant, Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program at Penn
  • 2007: IEEE Life Members' Fellowship in Electrical History
  • 2006: Lemelson Fellowship, Smithsonian National Museum of American History
  • 2006: Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship, Society for the History of Technology
  • 2003: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Selected Publications

  • "Bio-X" (review of Biomedicalization and Asian Biotech), Women's Studies Quarterly 40: Viral (forthcoming, spring 2012). (link)
  • "500-Type Colour Desk Set Telephone," Objects of Knowledge, of Art and of Friendship: A Small Technical Encyclopaedia for Siegfried Zielinski, ed. David Link and Nils Röller (Liepzig: Institut für Buchkunst, 2011), 51-53. (link)
  • co-editor (with John Tresch) of Grey Room 43: Audio/Visual (Spring 2011). (link)
  • “Deafening: Noise and the Engineering of Communication in the Telephone System,” Grey Room 43 (Spring 2011): 118-143. (link)
  • "Hearing Aids and the History of Electronics Miniaturization," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, 2 (April-June 2011): 24-45. (link)  Reprinted in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (Routledge, forthcoming 2012). (link)
  • "On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove," differences 22: The Sense of Sound (Summer-Fall 2011): 74-111. (link)
  • “Do Signals Have Politics? Inscribing Abilities in Cochlear Implants,” The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford University Press, 2011), 320-346. (link)
  • “Trained Judgment, Intervention, and the Biological Gaze: How Charles Sedgwick Minot Saw Senescence,” The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences, ed. Michael R. Dietrich and Nancy Anderson (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 14-43. (link)
  • “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information,” Social Text 102: The Politics of Recorded Sound (Spring 2010): 35-58. (link)
  • “Medien und Prothesen: Über den künstlichen Kehlkopf und den Vocoder,” Klangmaschinen zwischen Experiment und Medientechnik, ed. Daniel Gethmann (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 129-154. (link)
  • “When Mobile Communication Technologies Were New,” Endeavour 33 (December 2009): 140-146. (link)

Courses

  • Disability, Technology, and Media (undergrad)
  • On the Phone: Telephone and Mobile Communication Technology (undergrad)
  • History of Media and Communication (undergrad)
  • Introduction to Communication Research (doctoral methods)
  • Science and Technology Studies (STS) (grad)