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Siva Vaidhyanathan


Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry (the University of California Press, 2011). He also wrote Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Salon.com, Slate.com, openDemocracy.net, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, Esquire.com, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. Vaidhyanathan has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

March 18, 2015
September 16, 2013