University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Kevin Driscoll

Associate Professor, Associate Chair, Media Studies

Biography

Kevin Driscoll is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies. He specializes in technology, culture, and communication. His recent research concerns alternative histories of the internet, the politics of amateur telecommunications, and the moral economy of consumer software. In collaboration with Julien Mailland from Indiana University, he published "Minitel: Welcome to the Internet," a cultural and technological history of the French videotex network (MIT Press, 2017). His next book, "The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media," traces the origins of social media through the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 1980s and 1990s (Yale University Press, 2022).

Kevin joined the Department in the fall of 2016 after working as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. He holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and an M.S. from Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, he taught mathematics and computer science at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, MA.