Ted Striphas
Ted Striphas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana University. His research and teaching interests include media history, theory, and criticism; media law; and cultural studies. He is an award winning teacher and scholar.
In addition to authoring both the book and the blog, The Late Age of Print, Ted is co-editor (with Gregory J. Shepherd & Jeffrey St. John) of Communication as…: Perspectives on Theory (Sage, 2006) and (with Kembrew McLeod) of a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies on “The Politics of Intellectual Properties” (Taylor & Francis, 2006). The latter can be downloaded for free. Really.
Ted came to the study of book culture initially by way of comic books, which he read and collected avidly through his early adolescence. A tour of Marvel Comics, in 1987, cemented an enduring fascination with what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing industry.
Ted grew up in Goshen, New York in the 1970s and 80s, in what was then a quite rural community. The town had an inadequate public library and no major bookstore to speak of. Consequently, Ted became aware at a young age of how access to books was a privilege, and not a given.
While in graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Ted volunteered briefly at The Internationalist, a cooperatively owned bookstore and community center located in Chapel Hill. His doctoral dissertation won a Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association in 2004.
Ted’s next project will focus on contemporary religious book publishing. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
