Jacob Smith is the author of Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press 2008); Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (University of California Press 2011); The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance (University of California Press 2012); Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015); and two experimental audiobooks: ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene (University of Michigan Press 2019) and Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves (University of Michigan Press, 2021).
His most recent publication is Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
Education
- PhD Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University
Recent Publications
- Bridge to an Unseen Shore: New Age Music as Visionary Art, 1973-1987 (Forthcoming: University of California Press, Fall 2026)
- Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
- “Mackenzie Crook’s Biosemiotic Television,” Screen, Winter 2022.
- Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves (University of Michigan Press, 2021)
Recent Awards, Honors and Grants
- Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves won the SCMS Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award, 2022.
- Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves was a finalist for the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards, multimodal works category.
Courses
- History of the Recording Industry
- Musical Media
- Media and the Environment
- Meet David Lynch
- The Art of the Soundtrack
- Children’s Media Culture
- Understanding Creative Industries
- Sound Studies
- The Videographic Essay