Emily Thompson

Emily Thompson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the often-overlooked subject of sound and fills an important gap in contemporary American history, reaching into domains as diverse as urban design and cinema studies. In her book, The Soundscape of Modernity, she integrates the histories of the United States, technology, science, sound production, and acoustics to examine the transformation of the American soundscape from the turn of the century to the opening of Radio City Music Hall in 1933. Emily Thompson received a B.S. (1984) from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. (1992) from Princeton University. She has held teaching positions at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1992-93), Iowa State University (1994-95), and the University of Pennsylvania (1995-2002). Thompson was also a visiting scholar (2003-04) in the Program in Science, Technology and Society and a senior fellow (2002-03) at the Dibner Institute for History of Science and Technology, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She became an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego, in 2005.