Fred Turner

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture from World War II to the present. Turner is the author of five books, including From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Most recently, he and photographer Mary Beth Meehan co-created the award-winning collection of images and essays 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. Turner has also served as an Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. His recent writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The American Prospect, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Die Zeit.

Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.

Learn more: https://fredturner.stanford.edu/