Fred Turner

Fred Turner is 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. He is currently exploring ways that feminist and queer artists took up photography and electronic media in the late 1970s and early 1980s with an eye to understanding how changes in media technology shaped the origins of today’s culture wars. Turner is the author of five books, including From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013). 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 (University of Chicago Press, 2021). 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 (2007-2008 and 2014-2015). 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 is a faculty fellow at CASBS.