About
Please note Dr Mulvin will be on sabbatical leave during Winter Term 2025. See term dates.
Dr Dylan Mulvin is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where he also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications.
Dr Mulvin is a historian of media, technology, and culture. Drawing on methods from media studies, Science and Technology Studies, gender studies, and disability studies, Dr Mulvin investigates the intersecting history of culture and technology, and the ways media artefacts encode and crystallise assumptions about human perception, emotion, and behaviour. In other words, he studies the ways people make the stuff that we take for granted and what happens when it all falls apart. He is the author of Proxies: the Cultural Work of Standing In (published open access with MIT Press). He is currently writing a monograph on the history of anger, art, and media titled Technologies of Rage.
Expertise
Media History; Media Theory; Infrastructure Studies; Science and Technology Studies; History of Science and Technology; Visual Culture; Screen Technologies; Gender Studies; Disability Studies; 20th Century History; Cultural Studies
Research
Dr Mulvin has published widely on the history of media, technology, and culture. His book, Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In looks at the ways institutions enact and maintain their standards through human labour, embodied performance, and the materialisation of abstract ideas in physical things, images, and living models. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, becoming standards with which they build new infrastructures. These "proxies" carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. In Proxies, Dr Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes.
Dr Mulvin’s other research publications include a history of "night modes" in mobile screens, a media-theoretical treatment of atomic timekeeping, and a history of American colour television standards. He has investigated the domestication of computing in the 1990s, particularly the ways computing, code, and infrastructure were explained to vulnerable publics. This includes a (recovered) history of the Y2K crisis, as well as collaborative projects on the intersection of "viral cultures" in the histories HIV and computing, undertaken with Cait McKinney and funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is currently at work on a book about media, technology, and anger.
Teaching
Postgraduate teaching
In addition to his duties as Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications, Dr Mulvin convenes the Department's core postgraduate course on Theories and Concepts in Media and Communications, and an optional postgraduate course on Media, Technology and the Body. Dr Mulvin also contributes to team-taught postgraduate Media and Communications courses relating to theories and research methodologies.
In 2019, Dr Mulvin was presented with an LSE Excellence in Education Award for outstanding teaching contribution and educational leadership in the Deparment.
Doctoral supervision
Dr Mulvin supervises doctoral researchers and welcomes applications from prospective candidates with interest in his areas of expertise.