Finn Brunton
School of Information
University of Michigan
3441 North Quad
105 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
Tel: 734-764-2064 | Fax: 734-615-3587
finnb@umich.edu | http://finnb.net
Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Ph.D., Modern Thought, 2009
Dissertation title: “Spam in Action: Social Technology and Unintended Consequences.” Advisors: Prof. Christopher Fynsk, Prof. Mario Biagioli. Examiners: Prof. James Leach, Prof. Timothy Lenoir.
European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland
M.A., Communications Theory, 2006
UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
B.A., Interdisciplinary Studies, 2002
Assistant Professor of Information. School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Working on the digital humanities; history and politics of media, computing, and information systems; and a special focus on research in privacy, anonymity, innovation, and social dimensions of networking. 2010-current.
Postdoctoral Researcher. Department of Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt School, New York University. 2009-2010.
Spam: A Flood, A History, A Theory Book manuscript under contract with MIT; forthcoming 2012
Constitutive Interference: Spam and Networked Communities. Representations 117, Winter 2012
Vernacular Resistance to Data Collection and Analysis: A Political Theory of Obfuscation. Co-authored with Prof. Helen Nissenbaum. First Monday vol 16, no 5
Keyspace: Reflections on WikiLeaks and the Assange Papers. Radical Philosophy 166, Mar/Apr 2011
After WikiLeaks, Us The New Everyday, April 4, 2011
“Roar So Wildly”: Spam, Language, Technology. Radical Philosophy 164, Nov/Dec 2010
The Impossibility of Research. Coauthored with Gabriella Coleman for volume Media Meets Technology
The Metallurgical Machine: Exploring the Microchip with Dwarf Fortress. Paper in preparation
Digital and other new media (especially adaptation, modification, misuse and abuse); publicity, privacy, anonymity and trust; digital humanities; archaic and experimental media; mediated subcultures; hardware literacy; industrial, graphic and interaction design
SI110: Introduction to Information. Winter 2011, School of Information, University of Michigan.
SI535: Dead Media: Preserving Culture and Context. Winter 2011, School of Information, University of Michigan.
Dead Media Research Studio. Fall 2010, Department of Media, Culture & Communication, NYU-Steinhardt.
Introduction to Digital Media. Spring 2010, Department of Media, Culture & Communication, NYU-Steinhardt.
Digital Humanities: Contexts and Platforms. Co-taught with Dr. Kriss Ravetto, Fall 2008, School of Language & Literature, University of Aberdeen.
All Tomorrow’s Pirates: Foucault, Gibson, and the Walled City Radical Philosophy Conference, October 21 2011, Columbia University
Velocity/Growth: Essays and Experiments in the Digital Humanities. Institute for the Humanities, October 4 2011, University of Michigan
Dead Media: What the Obsolete, Unsuccessful, Experimental, and Avant-Garde Can Teach Us About the Future of Media. USENIX ATC 2011 and Webapps plenary session, June 16 2011, Portland OR
The Politics of User-Generated Content. With danah boyd, Mizuko Ito, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, and Jonathan McIntosh at Digital Media and Learning 2011, March 3-6, Long Beach, CA
Cryptography, Auditing, Perturbation, Obfuscation. Computers, Privacy and Data Protection 2011, January 25-27, Brussels, Belgium
Secret Languages: Privacy, Ownership and Federated Social Networks. Privacy Research Group, October 6 2010, New York University
Vernacular Resistance to Data Collection and Surveillance: A Political Theory of Obfuscation. EASST 2010, September 2-4 2010, Trento, Italy
An Infinite Continuum of Spewage: Bayesian filtering and the reinvention of spam. International Symposium on Electronic Art, August 20-29 2010, Ruhr, Germany
A User’s Guide to Lulzy Media, the Pleasure of Trickery, and the Politics of Spectacle: from Luddites to Anonymous. With Prof. Gabriella Coleman at Hackers On Planet Earth, July 17 2010, New York City
The Unbook. Computers and Writing Conference, May 20-23 2010, Purdue University
The Pleasure of Spam: Metagaming and Misuse in Early Computer Culture. Cultural Studies Association, March 18-20 2010, UC Berkeley
Creating and violating anonymity in online communities: the case of 4chan, Anon, and Dusty the Cat. Privacy Research Group, February 24 2010, New York University
Member of the Digital Environments Cluster
Member of the Values in Design (VID) Council, working with the Future Internet Architecture Workshop for the National Science Foundation, 2010
Consulting on the Unbook Lab at Illinois State University, 2010
Member of the Privacy Research Group, NYU, 2009-10
Member of the Mediations Group, NYU, 2009-10
http://enfoldment.net Collaborated with Processing artists and Prof. Laura Marks to create companion site for her book Enfoldment and Infinity (MIT, 2010)
http://finnb.net/a/b/ “Barricade/Labyrinth: Ten Years of Read/Writing Walter Benjamin,” personal project, 2010
http://crissp.poly.edu Creating and managing website for the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy, 2010
Created or consulted on various academic sitesGave interviews about social networks, spam, and digital culture by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, IEEE Spectrum, the New York Times, etc.