Craig Robertson

Craig Robertson is a media historian. His primary research interest is the history of information, with a new secondary research interest in DIY culture (specifically 1980s/90s independent/alternative music). Robertson has published three books and edited two volumes. In addition, his research has been published and reviewed in journals from a wide range of fields and disciplines including communication studies, history, design studies, library and information science, surveillance studies, immigration studies, and legal history/policy.
As an information historian, Robertson focuses on the relationship between paper and information, specifically how the recording, classification, and storage of information on paper affects not only who gets to handle and access information, but also how information is conceptualized as something people can use. He has also published on “the archive” as a way of representing and acting upon culture.

He is the author of two widely reviewed books on information history. The Atlantic described his award-winning The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information as a “captivating history.” Robertson argues the filing cabinet is a pivotal information technology that radically transformed the collection, storage, and retrieval of information. Key themes in the book center on changing relationships amongst conceptions of information, work, and organization. In his first book, The Passport in America: The History of a Document, Robertson sought to answer the question: how did a piece of paper become accepted as a reliable answer to the question, “Who are you?” In attempting to answer that question, he argues that debates about the use of the passport provide important insights into understandings of objectivity, standardization, truth, and bureaucratic labor, as well as reflecting shifting anxieties about class, race, gender, national identity, and citizenship. The New York Times called it “provocative.”
Robertson’s most recent book shifts his research focus to DIY culture. Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly is a biography of Chris Knox, an influential musician in the global alternative music scene of the 1980s and 1990s. It traces Knox’s creative life across multiple media to highlight the contested relationship between creativity and commerce in the pre-digital era.

An internationally recognized scholar, Robertson has been interviewed by multiple media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, NPR, National Geographic, and the Austral