Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan (born 1966) is an American cultural historian and media scholar, and the Robertson professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

Vaidhyanathan is a permanent columnist at The Guardian and Slate; he is also a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Slate, and The Baffler.

He directs the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, which produces a television show, a radio program, several podcasts, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

From 1988 through 1993 he was a professional journalist working for several Texas daily newspapers.

He has appeared in an episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss early social network services.

Vaidhyanathan is of Indian descent and was born in Buffalo, New York, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, earning a BA in History in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1999 in American Studies.

From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University, the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Columbia University.

Vaidhyanathan has appeared in several documentary films, including Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013), Inside the Mind of Google (2009), and Freedom of Expression (2007).

In 2016 Vaidhyanathan played a prominent role in the higher-education documentary, Starving the Beast.

Vaidhyanathan was portrayed as a character on stage at the Public Theater in New York City in a play called Privacy (2016).

Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Vaidhyanathan serves on the board of the Digital Public Library of America.