Karmiole Lecture: Landscapes, Labor, and the Infrastructures of Printed Newspapers

Michael Stamm is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley in 1994 and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2006. He has been at MSU since 2008, and he has served as Chairperson of the History Department since 2022. He is a political, cultural, and environmental historian specializing in media and journalism history. His first book, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), traced how American newspapers have responded to competition from “new media,” which in the decades after 1920 meant radio broadcasting. His most recent book is Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which offers a history of the printed newspaper tracing its production from the forest to the reader. In 2019, the book received Canadian Business History Association’s Best Book Prize. He is currently completing a book entitled Communicating with Nature: Agriculture, Materiality, and the Industrial Information Age, which traces the use of farm crops in the manufacturing of paper and ink and in the circulation of public information.