About Alex

I am a historian of law, media, public policy, and American cities.  I received my BA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and later earned a PhD in History from Columbia University, where I worked with Elizabeth Blackmar and Barbara Fields. My first book, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 (paperback, 2017), and my work has appeared in Salon, Al Jazeera, The Conversation, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, and Southern Cultures, among other publications. I am also a co-editor of the public history anthology East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte with Romeo Guzmán, Carribean Fragoza, and Ryan Reft (Rutgers, 2020).

I am currently an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of History at Georgia State University, where I teach about the history of cities, intellectual property, political culture, and technology, as well as public history and digital humanities.  I am also senior editor of the history blog Tropics of Meta.

You can find me at @akbarjenkins on Twitter; my CV is here.

Here is some of my writing on film, music, and other media.