About

Mara Mills is a professor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work encompasses a wide range of topics including communication processes, disability studies, feminist technoscience, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. She has contributed to scholarly discussions on assistive media, acoustics, and digital media, and has edited a new book series titled 'Disability in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine' with Johns Hopkins University Press. Mills is actively involved in research fellowships, including at the Charles Babbage Institute, and participates in various academic and public engagements such as conferences, podcasts, and collaborative projects that explore the intersections of technology, sound, and disability.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Art
• Communication
• Literature
• History
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• Alt Text: Feminist Technoscience Meets Crip Authorship

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2025-10-16

  articleOpen access

  From the very beginning, questions of accessibility and disability authorship were imagined as integral to the journal that became Catalyst. On the occasion of Catalyst’s tenth anniversary, Mara Mills initiated a conversation between herself and two other members of the journal’s first editorial team, Louise Hickman and David Serlin, to reflect on the way that feminist disability studies, as an interdisciplinary field, and accessibility features, such as alt text, were incorporated into the journal’s emerging editorial ethos.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Als mobile Kommunikationstechnologien noch neu waren

  Ars digitalis · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tester l’audition par la parole

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2024-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Mara Mills, “Testing Hearing with Speech”, in Alexandra Hui, Mara Mills, Viktoria Tkaczyk (dir.), Testing Hearing. The Making of Modern Aurality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020

  Publisher

• The History of “Impairment”

  Osiris · 2024-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Impairment is a key term in Anglophone disability studies and medical discourse, referring to physical difference, limitation, or injury. Yet its history has been obscured or misunderstood. When disability scholars and activists critique the definition of impairment, they generally place the concept in the genealogy of medicalization and inappropriate pathologization. This article, in contrast, traces the development of the impairment concept to the offices of modern American corporations, where actuaries played a key role alongside doctors as they employed new information technologies to quantify risk. Life insurance companies defined impairments, established surveillance systems to discover them, and created databases held by secretive institutions such as the Medical Information Bureau (MIB), with the help of early computing innovators including Melvil Dewey and Herman Hollerith. Beneath the seemingly objective measurement of physical traits, impairments ultimately signified to private corporations the possibility of financial loss or a justification for discrimination.

  PublisherDOI

• Thinking with an Accent

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 22 citations

  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.

  DOI

• Introduction: On Crip Authorship and Disability as Method

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-08-16 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scores

  Film Quarterly · 2022-01-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A prominent voice in the New Disability Arts movement, Carolyn Lazard is a multidisciplinary artist rethinking captioning and other access techniques as tools for composition. Reading several of Lazard’s works and collaborations, this essay theorizes the style of captions that functions as “scores”—open-ended scripts inviting audience members to activate the work, their bodies, and each other. As performance scores, these captions instruct or otherwise engage with readers/audiences, requesting their participation in the artmaking process. Lazard’s use of “scores” in works such as A Recipe for Disaster (2018), CRIP TIME (2018), and Notes from a Panorama (2021) carefully centers Black and brown, chronically ill, and other marginalized communities. As such, it uncovers the repetitive care labor of spectatorship as a form of survival.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction: “Citation Networks as Antidiscriminatory Practice”

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2021-10-26 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  During the Catalyst 5 th anniversary symposium, held online, the opening conversation between Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam gravitated to the topic of citation in feminist STS: how we "disappear" each other and how to build new fields of thought through

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aural Speed-Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks

  PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2020 · 21 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Visual arts

  Together they are writing a book entitled “Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed.” The authors would like to thank the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Jason Camlot, Iben Have, Burç Kostem, and Shafeka Hashash. We write the history of aural speed-reading and time-stretching technology in two tracks, taking a cue from Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice , with its “upper text” and “subtext” that invite readers “to invent a way of reading that works for them from scratch” (ix). In the spirit of the story that opens track 1, on the left, we decided to jimmy the format of the PMLA page. To differing degrees, each track provides context, describes events, raises questions, and applies analytic frames. Track 1 is our narration of a series of events recalled by Harvey Lauer to Mara Mills; the insights derive from his professional expertise and personal reading experiences. Track 2, on the right, does not benefit from the kind of omniscient sight known as hindsight; it reads alongside. Think of these tracks as an animated and mostly asynchronous conversation among people who care about instruments of sound and reading in distinct but similarly fanatical ways. For a cluster of historical recordings associated with this essay, tune in to the Sound and Science: Digital Histories database: acoustics.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/sets/clusters/aural-speed-reading.

  PublisherDOI

• Second Rate: Tempo Regulation, Helium Speech, and ‘Information Overload’

  2020-10-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Emily Apter

  New York University

  72 shared

• Rebecca L. Walkowitz

  72 shared

• Tejúmólá Ọláníyan

  Stanford University

  72 shared

• Vicente L. Rafael

  72 shared

• Kiran Mirchandani

  University of Toronto

  72 shared

• Lital Levy

  Princeton University

  72 shared

• Walter D. Mignolo

  72 shared

• Kelly Fritsch

  Carleton University

  10 shared

Awards & honors

• IEEE History Prize (Society for the History of Technology)
• Walter Benjamin Award (Media Ecology Association)
• Irving Zola Award (Society for Disability Studies)
• Jim Ferris Award for Outstanding Achievement in Disability a…