Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove is Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Doctorat du 3e cycle in Sociology of Art from the University of Tours (France) in 1979. He was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology from 1972 to 1980 and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author. He edited Understanding 1984 (UNESCO, 1984) and co-edited with Amilcare Iannucci, McLuhan e la metamorfosi dell’uomo (Bulzoni, 1984) two collections of essays on McLuhan, culture, technology and biology. He also co-edited with Charles Lumsden The Alphabet and the Brain (Springer Verlag, 1988), a book which scientifically assesses the impact of the Western alphabet on the physiology and the psychology of human cognition. Another publication, La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne appeared in France in December, 1990 and in Italy the following year (Feltrinelli, 1991). Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Bosch & Keuning, 1991) addresses the differences between the effects of television, computers and hypermedia on corporate culture, business practices and economic markets. The Skin of Culture (Somerville Press, 1995) is a collection of essays on the new electronic reality which stayed on Canadian best-sellers lists for several months. It was translated in a dozen languages including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Polish and Slovenian. Connected Intelligence (Somerville, 1997) introduced his research on new media and cognition. His latest book The Architecture of Intelligence was first issued in Dutch in December 2000, and in English (June 2001), Italian and German in September 2001. It is being translated now in Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. His next book, McLuhan for Managers, in collaboration with Mark Federman, is due for publication in the Spring of 2003. He is also contracted to work on a book about the history of stage performance from early Greek theatre to modern Opera, in collaboration with Francesco Monico.
