Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2009
phone: 404-413-6386
email: alexcummings@gsu.edu

Alex Sayf Cummings is a historian of law, media, and the American landscape. His work examines how the ideological transition to an “information society” reshaped American political culture and economic policy, as well as the built environment. He received his BA (2003) from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and PhD (2009) from Columbia University, studying with Elizabeth Blackmar and Barbara Fields. His first book, a history of music piracy and intellectual property law in the United States, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He has been the recipient of the Torbet Prize, a Whiting Fellowship, and, most recently, a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Selected Publications

“Life in the Menagerie: David Crockett Graham and Missionary-Scientists in Sichuan, China, 1911-1948,” American Baptist Quarterly (Fall 2009).

“Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930-1952,” in David Suisman and Susan Strasser, eds., Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

“From Monopoly to Intellectual Property: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright, 1909-1971,” Journal of American History.