Torin Monahan

Torin Monahan is co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Surveillance & Society, a former director of the Surveillance Studies Network, and a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is best known for his work on the social and cultural dimensions of surveillance systems.

Education Monahan received a Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University, Northridge in 1993, and a Master of Arts in English (with distinction) from the same university in 1996. Monahan then pursued additional graduate training in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, receiving a Master of Science in STS in 2002 followed by a PhD in STS in 2003.

Career Monahan worked as an assistant professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University from 2003 to 2008. He moved to Vanderbilt University in 2008, where he was an associate professor of Human and Organizational Development and associate professor of medicine from 2008 to 2012. He began as an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 and has been Professor at the same institution since 2015.

Research Monahan's research focuses on institutional and cultural transformations with new technologies, with a particular emphasis on surveillance and security programs. He has written on Department of Homeland Security data fusion centers, surveillance and inequality in schools, managerial supervision with hospital tracking systems, racial violence, and artistic modes of resistance to state surveillance. He has served as Principal Investigator on several National Science Foundation-funded grants, including the Platform Mediation research project studying the ways that cities contend with platforms like Uber and Airbnb.

Reception Monahan's book Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity received the 2011 Surveillance Studies Book Prize from the Surveillance Studies Network for the world's best English language book published on the topic of surveillance. His book Crisis Vision received honorable mention for the 2023 Surveillance Studies Book Prize.

Selected works Monahan, Torin. Globalization, Technological Change, and Public Education. Routledge (2005). Monahan, Torin. (Ed.) Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. Routledge (2006). Monahan, Torin, and Rodolfo D. Torres (Eds.) Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press (2010). Gilliom, John, and Torin Monahan. SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society. University of Chicago Press (2013). Monahan, Torin, and David Murakami Wood. (Eds.) Surveillance Studies: A Reader. Oxford University Press (2018). Monahan, Torin. Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance. Duke University Press (2022).