Plenary 2: The Authenticity Engine

Adrian Johns is a professor in the Department of History and chairs the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, which won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. Johns has also published widely in the history of science and the history of the book.

Educated in Britain at the University of Cambridge, Johns has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology. He is currently working on a history of intellectual piracy from the invention of printing to the Internet.