Education
Columbia University, (New York, New York), 2003-2009
- PhD in Modern United States History, with distinction (May 2009)
- Dissertation: Music Piracy and the Value of Sound, 1909-1998
- Committee: Elizabeth Blackmar, Barbara Fields, Brian Larkin, Sarah Phillips, and Andie Tucher
- MA in Modern United States History (May 2005)
- Thesis: Portland, Oregon and the Making of the One-Newspaper Town
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1999-2003
- BA in History, Summa cum laude, with University Honors (May 2003)
- Thesis: Orientalism, Religion, and the West China Border Research Society, 1911-1948
Employment
Professor, Department of History, Georgia State University, 2021-present
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History, Georgia State University, 2018-2021
Associate Professor, Department of History, Georgia State University, 2016-2021
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Georgia State University, 2010-2016
Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow, Media Studies Program, Vassar College, 2008-2010
Hofstadter Fellow, Department of History, Columbia University, 2003-2008
Books
Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback, 2017).
Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy (New York: Columbia University Press, Studies in the History of US Capitalism series, 2020).
Editor, with Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzman, and Ryan Reft, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Latinidad series, 2020).
Journal Articles & Book Chapters
“Yuppie Flu and Kafka Too: 1980s Odysseys in After Hours and Safe,” forthcoming in Beneficial Shock.
“Gone Game: How David Fincher and Gillian Flynn Showed Us That We Just Can’t Win,” Beneficial Shock 9 (Fall 2024), 70-75.
“The Storm Inside: It’s the End of the World as They Know It,” Beneficial Shock 8 (Winter 2023): 60-65.
“Listening to the Democratic Forest with Brian Harnetty,” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 2 (2021): 66–73.
“Dreams of Escape and Belonging: The Making of Asian El Monte since 1965,” in Guzman, et al, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 135-145.
“‘We Think a Lot’: From Square to Hip in North Carolina’s Research Triangle,” in Shawn Bingham and Lindsey Freeman, eds., The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
“Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Origins of the Creative City, 1953-1965,” Journal of Urban History 43 (2017).
“Of Sorcerers and Thought Leaders: Marketing the ‘Information Revolution’ in the 1960s,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture 9 (2016): 1-25.
“The Thing Called Information: Understanding Alienation in the Information Economy,” Tropics of Meta, 1 June 2015.
“Atlanta’s BeltLine Meets the Voters,” in Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, eds. City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (n+1/Faber and Faber, 2015).
“Bootlegging as Material Culture,” American History Now, 17 February 2014.
“Vinyl as New Media,” American History Now, 3 February 2013.
“Only Typing? Informal Writing, Blogging, and the Academy,” with Jonathan Jarrett, in Writing History in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2013).
“The Bootleg South: The Geography of Music Piracy in the 1970s,” Southern Cultures (Spring 2013): 82-97.
“From Monopoly to Intellectual Property: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright, 1909-1971,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010): 659-81.
“Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930-1952,” in David Suisman and Susan Strasser, eds., Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 95-114.
“Life in the Menagerie: David Crockett Graham and Missionary-Scientists in Sichuan, China, 1911-1948,” American Baptist Quarterly (Fall 2009), 206-27.
Selected Popular Media
“The Brutalist and the Nightmare of the American Dream,” PLATFORM, January 27, 2025, https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-brutalist-and-the-nightmare-of-the-american-dream.
“Hospice of the Creative Class,” Columbia University Press Blog, 3 April 2020.
“The House that MC Escher and the Marquis de Sade Built,” PLATFORM, 7 October 2020.
“Music Piracy Is Older than You Think,” Learn Liberty, 20 April 2017.
“Información: La revolución que no occurió (translation),” Historia Global Online, 19 July 2016.
“Information: The Revolution that Didn’t Happen,” Age of Revolutions, 11 July 2016.
“The Invention of the Information Revolution,” OUP Blog, 15 April 2016.
“After the Gold Rush: How Can Musicians Survive in the Streaming Economy?” Aeon, 4 August 2015.
“The ‘Blurred Lines’ of Music and Copyright,” OUP Blog, 22 April 2015.
“Top Ten Books on Media History,” Daily History, 8 August 2014.
“News Corp, Time Warner, and the Veneer of Media Diversity,” The Conversation (Australia), 21 July 2014.
“Women’s Rights, Human Rights, and Feminist Men,” Sherights, 31 March 2014.
“The Foolish War against Song-Lyrics Websites,” Al Jazeera America, 3 January 2014.
“Bradley Manning Verdict Another Sorry Episode for Obama and ‘US Liberals,’” The Conversation (Australia), 31 July 2013.
“The End of Ownership,” OUP Blog, 21 June 2013.
“Why MOOCs Are Like the Music Industry,” History News Network, 30 May 2013.
“Forget Copyright! We’ve Always Stolen Music,” Salon, 28 April 2013.
“‘No Pakistanis’: The Racial Satire the Beatles Don’t Want You to Hear,” Salon, 14 April 2013.
“Galifianakis: Liberal Hero,” Salon, 10 August 2012.
“Where Does the Anti-SOPA Movement Go Next?” Salon, 30 January 2012.
“Arab Hillbilly Goes to New York,” in Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
“Is Piracy Killing Independent Music?” Brooklyn Rail, December 2007.
Book Reviews
“‘How Machines Came to Speak (and How to Shut Them Up)’: Alex Sayf Cummings on Jennifer Petersen’s How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech,”U.S. Intellectual History Blog, 24 September 2023.
“Cold War Roots of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance,” The Metropole, June 6, 2021.
“Athens’s Revolutionaries: A Review of Cool Town,” The Metropole, August 26, 2020.
Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright, by Monika Dommann, Technology and Culture 60 (October 2019): 1123-4.
Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue, by Catherine Fisk, Journal of American History 105 (2018): 432-3.
Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin by Eliot M. Tretter, Journal of Social History 51 (December 2017).
Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942-1968, by Michael James Roberts, Journal of Popular Music Studies 27 (March 2017).
Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility, by George Cotkin, in H-1960s, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, June 2016, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=45889.
Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History that Talks Back, eds. Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano, in The Journal of American Culture 38 (June 2015): 163-4.
Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South, by Kari Frederickson, in North Carolina Historical Review 91 (October 2014): 464-5.
MP3: The Meaning of a Format, by Jonathan Sterne, in Technology and Culture 54 (October 2013): 1007-8.
Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929, by Barry Kernfeld, in Journal of American History 99 (September 2012): 646.
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, in Technology and Culture 53 (October 2012), 922-3.
Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, by Lucas Hilderbrand, in Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 27 (December 2011): 373-7.
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by James Boyle, in Technology and Culture 52 (October 2011): 50-51.
Tactical Media, by Rita Raley, in Technology and Culture 52 (July 2011): 51-53.
Presentations
“The Urban and the Global: Toward a History of U.S. Cities in the World,” roundtable discussion at Urban History Association conference (Pittsburgh, PA), 29 October 2023.
Commentator on panel, “Women Without Borders: Contesting and Creating Spaces for Resistance,” with Emily Hunt, Megan Neary, and Leslie Whitmire, at 2023 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities, Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, CA), 30 June 2023.
“The Political Economy of Information,” invited lecture, Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago, IL), 15 February 2023.
“Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy,” UNC’s Working Group on Economic Development, with Brent Lane, Scott Levitan, and Mac McCorkle, Global Research Institute (Chapel Hill, NC), 25 January 2023.
“Ethnic Studies Curriculum Building for High School Teachers” workshop, Mountain View High School (El Monte, California), 26 April 2022.
“Migration from Southeast Asia and the El Monte Sweatshop,” in “A New Cartography of Greater El Monte: The Asian American Experience,” bicycle tour organized by the South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP) and Active San Gabriel Valley (Active SGV), 26 February 2022.
“Remaking Cities in the Wake of Deindustrialization and Gentrification,” in “The Legacy of Modernism in the Berkshires and Beyond: A Roundtable and Community Discussion” (Pittsfield, MA), 3 July 2021.
“Digital Publishing Now: A Conversation With the Editors of The Metropole, Metropolitics, Platform, and Tropics of Meta,” roundtable discussion at Society of American Regional and Planning History conference (Crystal City, VA), 1 November 2019.
“Academic Blogging Roundtable: Networks, Perspectives, Trajectories,” panel discussion at American Historical Association annual meeting (Chicago, IL), 5 January 2019.
“Writing for Public Audiences: Promises and Perils,” talk at Pursuing Diverse Careers in the Humanities workshop, Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA), 9 November 2018.
“Embracing the Digital Humanities,” panel presentation with Will Greer and Nicolas Hoffmann at Georgia Association of Historians Annual Conference (Macon, GA), 16 February 2018.
“Admen and Automatons: The Making of the Postindustrial Society, 1956-1967,” invited talk at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 16 November 2017.
“RTP and the Invention of Creative Capitalism, 1955-2018,” invited talk at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 16 November 2017.
Commentator on panel, “Planning from Below,” at Society of American City and Regional Planning History Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH), 28 October 2017.
Commentator on panel, “The Transfer of Planning Ideas,” at Society of American City and Regional Planning History Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH), 27 October 2017.
“Exploring the Origins of the Creative Economy in North Carolina’s Research Triangle,” invited talk at Smart Cities Workshop, University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta), 18 August 2017.
“Lost in the Triangle: North Carolina and the Invention of the Information Economy,” invited talk at Middle Georgia State University (Macon, GA), 11 April 2017.
“Cary, SAS, and the Search for the Good Life in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, 1960-2010,” in the panel “Reworking the Sunbelt,” at Urban History Association conference 2016 (Chicago, IL), 15 October 2016.
“Research Triangle Park: High-Tech Suburbia in the Post-Industrial South,” presentation and guided bus tour at Vernacular Architecture Forum (Durham, NC), 5 June 2016.
Comment on “Civil Rights in the Postwar Era,” Association of Historians at Georgia State University annual graduate student conference (Atlanta, GA), 25 March 2016.
“Bourgeois Utopias in a Postindustrial South: RTP and Parkwood,” in the panel “Selling the Sunbelt: Post-War Housing and Economic Development Across the U.S. Sunbelt Region,” at Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) conference 2015 (Los Angeles, CA), 6 November 2015.
“Is the BeltLine Bad for Atlanta?” invited talk at the Carter Library, 28 May 2015.
“Raleigh-Durham and the Fate of the Postindustrial City,” invited talk at Google Atlanta, 7 April 2015.
“Raleigh-Durham and the Cold War Origins of the ‘Creative’ City,” in the panel “Landscapes of Inequality and Opportunity in the Cold War Sunbelt, 1945-1968,” at Seventh Biennial Urban History Association Conference (Philadelphia, PA), 11 October 2014.
“Marketing the ‘Information Revolution’: The Politics of Intellectual Property in Postwar America,” invited talk at Special Libraries Association of Georgia Spring Lunch (Atlanta, GA), 20 May 2014.
“Inventing the ‘Creative’ City: Cultural Capital and the Making of North Carolina’s Research Triangle,” paper discussion at Social Science Research Seminar, Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC), 6 March 2014.
“Piracy and the Future of the Information Economy,” invited talk at the Department of History, Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC), 5 March 2014.
“How Pirates Invented the Modern Music Industry,” at 2013 AJC Decatur Book Festival, 1 September 2013, in Decatur, GA.
“Inventing the ‘Information Revolution’: The Politics of Intellectual Property in Postwar America,” in the panel “Finding Intellectual Property in American History: Twentieth-Century Struggles over Information, Law, and Policy,” at the Organization of American Historians 2014 Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA (accepted).
“Can the Parking Lot Speak?” in roundtable discussion, “Bodies in Space,” with Jason Coy and Kate Wilson, at The Place of History: 2013 AHGSU Graduate Student Conference, Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA), 4 April 2013.
“Importing PhDs: How the Research Triangle Invented the Creative Class City, 1953-1980,” in the panel “From the Heartland to the High Rises: The Spatial Economy of Capitalism in Post-1945 America and the Eclipse of Liberalism,” at the 2013 Business History Conference (Columbus, OH), 15 April 2013.
“Why Information Matters: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” invited talk at the Department of History, University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), 17 January 2013.
“‘Containment Area for Relocated Yankees’: Changing Demographics and a New Political Culture in North Carolina’s Research Triangle,” in the session “Federal Diversity: Racial and Gendered Effects of Postwar Federal Interventions on Metropolitan Regions,” at Sixth Biennial Urban History Association Conference (New York, NY), 26-28 October 2012.
“‘Not a Second Ruhr’: Building a Post-Industrial Economy in North Carolina’s Research Triangle,
1953-1965,” in the session, “Opportunity and Inequality in the Postwar American City,” at 2012 Policy History Conference (Richmond, VA), 7 June 2012.
“Music Piracy and the Emergence of Social Media,” in the session, “Before ‘Social Media’: Communication, Community, and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States,” at 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (Chicago, IL), 8 January 2012.
“The Big Lie of Neoliberalism,” at Crisis in Georgia: Austerity, Racism and Resistance (panel), organized by Georgia Students for Public Higher Education, Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA), 27 October 2011.
Comment on “To Be Bound as Her Adopted Child” and “Girl Guiding and the Civilizing Mission of Imperialism,” Association of Georgia State University Historians conference, Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA), 16 April 2011.
“Honor among Thieves? The Music Industry’s Effort to Create a Moral Panic over Piracy in the 1970s,” at Georgia Association of Historians 2011 Annual Meeting (Savannah, GA), 24-26 February 2011.
“‘Climate’ Change: Inventing an Urban Milieu in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, 1954-1965,” at Southern American Studies Association 2011 Biennial Conference, Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA), 19 February 2011.
“The Rise of the Free Information Culture,” at the Spring Intellectual Buffet, Vassar College, 6 May 2010.
“Bootlegging as a Form of Anti-Capitalist Consumerism,” in the session “The Commerce of Social Change: Business, Consumer Culture, and American Politics, 1950-1980,” at 2010 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians (Washington, DC), 10 April 2010.
“Culture Industries,” chair, at 2010 Annual Meeting of the Business History Conference (Athens, GA), 27 March 2010.
“Using New Media to Map the History of the Information Economy,” poster session at 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (San Diego, CA), 9 January 2010.
“The Technology and Rhetoric of Democratic Access to Sound Recordings,” at Humanities and Technology Association Conference, University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), September 24-26 2009.
“The Forms of Bootleg Culture in Twentieth Century America,” invited talk at the Department of Art and Art History, St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN), 21 April 2009.
“Sound Recording and the Rise of an Intellectual Property Movement in the United States,” talk at the Department of History, Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY), 27 March 2009.
“Technology, Counterculture, and the Bootleg Boom,” at Popular Music & Popular Culture: Intersections and Histories (IASPM-Canada annual conference), Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario), May 9-11, 2008.
“Jazz Collectors and Copying as Preservation,” at Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (conference), Hagley Museum and Library (Wilmington, Delaware), November 29, 2007.
Awards and Fellowships
Certificate of Recognition for East of East, El Monte United High School District, 3 March 2021.
Certificate of Merit—Best Historical Research on Record Labels and General Recording Topics, for Democracy of Sound, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, 2018
AHA Career Diversity Implementation Grant, with Denise Davidson and Michelle Brattain, 2018-20
Humanities for All Project Grant, California Humanities, with Romeo Guzman and Sean Slusser, 2017
AHA Career Diversity Grant, with Denise Davidson, Dylan Ruediger, and Michelle Brattain, Association of American Historians, 2016
Provost’s Faculty Fellowship Award, Georgia State University, 2016
Summer Research Funding, Georgia State University Department of History, 2014
Archie K. Davis Fellowship, North Caroliniana Society, 2014
Dale Somers Memorial Award for Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship, Georgia State University Department of History, 2014
Dean’s Early Career Award, Georgia State University, 2013-2014
Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship, 2010-2011
Society of American Historians Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize nominee, 2010
Bancroft Dissertation Prize nominee, Columbia University, 2009
Harvard Society of Fellows nominee, Harvard University, 2009
Christian A. Johnson Consortium for Faculty Diversity Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Vassar College, 2009-2010
Consortium for Faculty Diversity Scholar Travel Fund Grant, 2009
Christian A. Johnson Consortium for Faculty Diversity Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, Vassar College, 2008-2009
Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2008-2009 (declined)
Whiting Fellowship, 2008-2009 (declined)
Summer Research Fellowship, Columbia University, 2007-2008
Torbet Prize, American Baptist Historical Society, 2007
Research Fellow, Center for Popular Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University, 2007
Hofstadter Fellowship, Department of History, Columbia University, 2003-2008
Secondary Education Teaching Award, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2003
Davenport Scholar, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2001
North Carolina Teaching Fellow, 1999-2003
ALEX SAYF CUMMINGS 