Emeritus Professor Douglas Kahn
Emeritus Professor
• Ph.D., Art History and Theory, Western Sydney University (1998). Dissertation: Techniques and Tropes of Sound, Voice and Aurality in Artistic Modernism. Supervised by Dr. Helen Grace.
• M.A., Music Composition, World Music Program, Wesleyan University (1987). Studied with Alvin Lucier.
• M.F.A., Post-studio Art, Cal Arts (1976), Studied with Vito Acconci, David Antin, John Baldessari, Yvonne Rainer and James Tenney.
• Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, The Evergreen State College (1973)
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of Art & Design
Douglas Kahn is an historian and theorist of energies in the arts, sound in the arts and sound studies, and media arts, from the late-19th Century to the present.
His books include Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019); Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins (University of California Press, 2012); and Source: Music of the Avant-garde, edited with Larry Austin (University of California Press, 2011).
He received an ARC Future Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation.
He is also Professor Emeritus at University of California at Davis, with previous positions as Professor and Founding Director of Technocultural Studies, UC Davis; Associate Professor of Media Arts and Production, University of Technology, Sydney, and Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance, Arizona State University West.
E-mail
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
• Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, "The Natural History of Media: Aesthetics, nature and communications technology," (2012-2016): $816,391.
• Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, runner-up for Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2014).
• Arts Writers Grant, Creative Capital and Warhol Foundation, for Earth Sound Earth Signal (2009).
• Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The historical discovery of natural radio (2006—2007).
• John McCarron New Writing in Arts Criticism Award, 1989.
• Grand Prize Winner, MacIntosh Masters Computer Art Competition, 1989.