Adrian Johns (academic)


Adrian Dominic Sinclair Johns is a British-born academic. He earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2001, and was appointed the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012.
Johns is best known for his works on the history of information, particularly The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making and Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
Johns met Alison Winter at Cambridge in 1987, and the two married in 1992. She died in 2016.

Eisenstein-Johns Debate

In 2002, Johns was involved in a debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein in the American Historical Review over the degree to which printing was necessarily an agent of change or, as Johns claimed, a vehicle of change which carried messages that were mostly shaped by outside social forces.

Selected bibliography