Prof. Marvin's book receives Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association

Carolyn Marvin, Ph.D.

Carolyn Marvin, Ph.D., the Frances Yates Professor of Communication, has won the Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association for her work, When old technologies were new: Thinking about communication in the late nineteenth century (Oxford).

 

The award recognizes those books that have made a substantial contribution to the scholarship of the communication field, as well as the broader rubric of the social sciences, and have stood some test of time. Any book nominated must have been available for at lest the immediate past five years prior to the conference at which the award is presented. Prof. Marvin will receive the award at the ICA conference in Boston next month.

 

The book explores how two innovations--the telephone and the electric light--were publicly envisioned at the end of the nineteenth century, as seen in specialized engineering journals and popular media. Prof. Marvin pays particular attention to the telephone, describing how it disrupted established social relations, unsettling customary ways of dividing the private person and family from the more public setting of the community.

 

Last October the book was named the number one rated book on The Atlantic’s new “Atlantic Tech Cannon,” a list of the 50 most influential trade and scholarly works about science and technology.

 

This is the third consecutive year that an Annenberg faculty member has won the Fellows Book award.  In 2009, Annenberg Profs. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella were presented with the Fellows Award for their work, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (Oxford).  In 2010 Prof. Elihu Katz won for his work with Danial Dayan Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Harvard).