Mara Mills

Mara Mills is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she co-directs the Center for Disability Studies. Her research focuses on the history of communication engineering, hearing measurement, and sound technology, particularly within the context of the Bell System and its impact on societal understandings of disability.

• Co-director, Center for Disability Studies, NYU
• DAAD Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Her forthcoming book, On the Phone: Hearing Loss and Communication Engineering (Duke University Press), explores the intersection of deafness and technological innovation in the telephone industry. She has also contributed to projects like Testing Hearing: Science, Art, Industry and Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed, examining how auditory thresholds and audio time-stretching technologies were historically constructed.

Mills collaborates with scholars such as Jonathan Sterne on the history of audio time compression and optical character recognition (OCR). Her work integrates archival research with critical analysis of scientific rhetoric, material culture, and the politics of technology.

Awards

• Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize (with Alumni Xiaochang Li)

Collaborations

She has been associated with the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, contributing to publications in Technology and Culture and participating in colloquia and conferences on historical acoustics.