Jonathan Sterne

Jonathan Edward Sterne, born August 6, 1970, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, died on March 20, 2025, in Lincoln, MA, at Care Dimensions Hospice House. Jonathan had been living in Cambridge, MA for the 2024-2025 academic year on a faculty fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

In October 2024, Jonathan was diagnosed with anaplastic thyroid cancer that spread from his lungs and led to his death. Prior to his death, he had lived for fifteen years with papillary thyroid cancer that had metastasized to his lungs. He regularly blogged about his experiences living with and managing cancer as a chronic disease.

Jonathan was James McGill Professor of Culture and Technology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he was on faculty from 2004 until the time of his death. His research and writing, and the students he trained, have transformed key areas of scholarship centred on media history, culture and technology, sound studies, disability studies, and internet studies.

Jonathan received numerous accolades over his career, including several teaching and student mentorship awards at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught from 1999-2004, and at McGill University. In 2024 he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and became a Fellow of the International Communication Association, the field's largest professional organization. In 2023, he was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada.

Jonathan wrote three award-winning books published by Duke University Press. The Audible Past (2003) ushered in news ways of studying and thinking about sound recording as a historical and modern phenomenon, helping establish the field of sound studies. MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012) tells a 100-year history of the MP3 format based on early psychoacoustics, telecommunications, and hearing research that shaped the format's perceptual coding for compressing audio files.

His book Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (2021) offered key axioms of impairment phenomenology for thinking, accounting for, and writing about impairment: 1) impaired existence, like all existence, is not fully available to our consciousness of it; 2) account for lived experience as if impairment is a constant possibility, if not already; 3) represent impairment in how people write about what it is to live a life; and 4) address the implications of what emerges through impairment phenomenology to make change and build more just, accessible worlds. As he said, the state of not seeing, hearing, or feeling well could "lead you somewhere you absolutely don't want to go; it could also lead you somewhere new and beautiful." He knew this personally. Jonathan co-authored, edited and co-edited numerous other books, book chapters, and articles. At the time of his death, he was leading the "Jonathan Ensemble" (a collective writing project) on the book Sound and AI (Artificial Intelligence), on new systems of machine listening and automated sound generation, and the forms of power and ideas about hearing and listening built into them.

Jonathan organized his life around playing music with other people, an activity he found especially meaningful and enjoyable. He played in eight bands over this lifetime, two with his wife Carrie. A bass player, a touch guitarist, a player of modular and other synthesizers, and a budding pianist, Jonathan could do incredible things with sound. He played his main instrument, the bass guitar, as a melody instrument, delighting in breaking rules of expected play, and reveling in heavy grooves, the art of signal processing and the beauty of gnarly pedal effects. He loved to laugh and was an aficionado of the absurd and silly. He was an excellent listener, an incredible friend to hundreds of people, an unparalleled advisor and mentor, and a willing ear to many, including strangers. He transformed people's lives, and he was transformed by them.

While he was considered a "star" academic, many people describe how Jonathan never acted like one. He treated people as equals, and he saw the value, significance and uniqueness of each person. He always advised people to pay forward what they learned, including how to be in good relation with others, how to make things better for as many people as possible, and how to have fun doing so. He welcomed people's differences and embraced their vulnerabilities with care and grace. People felt seen, heard, and understood by Jonathan. This was especially the case for other people who live with disability and/or with cancer, as he did, or feel like they don't belong. In addition to his cancer blog, many people found his website (https://sterneworks.org) personally and professionally helpful.

It's important to know these things to really know who Jonathan was. He made friends easily, including on early internet bulletin boards in 1982. He was a very social person and LOVED a good party. He and Carrie threw some memorable ones, starting with the costume party that was their wedding in 1999 (or as they called it, their "meeting with the state"). In his senior year of high school, he was crowned homecoming king, of an nontraditional kind. Jonathan was a big man with a huge personality. He loved being seen, he loved performing music and giving talks, and he was known for his great hats and brightly coloured shirts. He had a deep love for cats, including but not limited to those with whom he and Carrie shared their life.

Jonathan graduated in 1989 from Hopkins High School in Hopkins, MN, and received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in Humanities from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 1993, where he was inducted into The Phi Beta Kappa Society. Jonathan completed his master's degree in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1995, where an Andrew H. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Study supported his first year of graduate study. In 1999, he completed his doctorate at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received a Certificate in Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

Jonathan is survived by his spouse, Carrie Ann Rentschler, their cats Tako and Galaxie, his mother Muriel Sterne (Weinstein), his brother David Sterne, his sister-in-law Lori Sterne, niece and nephew Abigail and Adam Sterne, mother-in-law Kay Larsen (Judy Andersen) and father-in-law Louis Rentschler (Dianne). He was preceded in death by his father Richard Sterne, stepfather James Phillip Griffin, uncle Myron Weinstein, aunt Helen Avati (Weinstein) and uncle Mario Avati.

For those who wish to make contributions in his honour, as he would say, do what makes you happy. If they do, contributions could be of time and/or service, rather than money. If it is helpful to know, Jonathan lent his own support to other people with thyroid cancer, many students and their research, local independent musicians, independent journalism, a free and open internet, and efforts to mitigate climate catastrophe and its myriad effects on the human and natural world.

A Celebration of life will be held August 10, 2025 at Unitarian Universalist Church of Minnetonka, 2030 Wayzata Blvd E, Wayzata, MN 55391. Officiating by Rev. Lisa Friedman. 3 p.m. service to honour Jonathan, 4-6 p.m. reception. Another celebration of life will be held in Montreal sometime in 2026.