Mara Mills is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (on leave 2009-2010). She received her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include media studies, science and literature studies, and the histories of communication engineering and biotechnology. Her current book project traces the historical relationship between the telephone system, deafness, and signal processing. For this research, she has been awarded fellowships by the NSF, the IEEE, the NIH, the Robert Wood Johnson

Health & Society Scholars Program at Penn, and the Society for the History of Technology, among others. Recent and forthcoming publications include articles in Social Text, Endeavour, Rhizomes, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, and The Sound Studies Handbook. With John Tresch, Mills is co-editing a special issue of Grey Room on the "Audio/Visual." Her future projects include an article on the history of the printed circuit and a longer study on the history of "talking books."