29 Facts About Marshall Poe

Marshall Tillbrook Poe was born on December 29,1961 and is an American historian, writer, editor and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of non-fiction authors.

Marshall Poe has taught Russian, European, Eurasian and World history at various universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Marshall Poe has taught courses on new media and online collaboration.

Marshall Poe has published A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, a book that examines how various communications media shape social practices and values.

In 2005, Marshall Poe founded the now-defunct MemoryArchive, a universal wiki-type archive of contemporary memoirs.

In 2006, Marshall Poe wrote an influential commentary on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, while serving as a writer, researcher and editor at The Atlantic magazine.

Marshall Poe was born in Huntsville, Alabama on December 29,1961.

Marshall Poe taught at Harvard University from 1989 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2002, during which time he was appointed Allston Burr Senior Tutor at Harvard's Lowell House where he managed a college of 600 undergraduate students and 50 tutors and staff.

Marshall Poe taught at New York University, American University, the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Marshall Poe has held fellowships at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard; the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; and the Harriman Institute for Russian Studies at Columbia University.

At the Institute for Advanced Study, Marshall Poe played guitar and sang in a loud rock and roll band called "Do Not Erase," consisting entirely of fellows at the institute.

Marshall Poe's writing ranges from academic articles and books to magazine and Internet pieces intended for wider audiences.

Marshall Poe has written extensively on Russian history as well on communications, the Internet and Wikipedia.

Marshall Poe is the co-founder and a former editor of the academic journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Marshall Poe is the author or editor of several books on Russia including A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography and The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century.

Marshall Poe argues the Soviet Union did not collapse because of the failure of Communism as many pundits assert.

Marshall Poe became known for his commentary on Wikipedia following the publication of his article "The Hive" in The Atlantic.

Marshall Poe's gamble paid off when the editors published it in the summer of 2006.

Marshall Poe concludes that Wikipedia's "communal regime" permitted rapid growth as well as organization and improvement.

In 2011, Marshall Poe published A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, a 337-page book that analyzes how media networks originate, how they function and how they shape social practices and values.

Marshall Poe explains in the book's introduction that he is seeking to expand and refine the communications theories of the late Canadian scholar Harold Innis.

Marshall Poe argues, for example, that audiovisual media such as radio, telephone, television and film were developed well before they were taken up by industrial capitalists who needed more effective ways to market the goods they produced.

Marshall Poe writes about five periods in media history: the age of speech, the age of manuscripts, the age of print, the age of audiovisual media and the age of the Internet.

Marshall Poe provides a detailed analysis of each under eight headings: accessibility, privacy, fidelity, volume, velocity, range, persistence and searchability.

Marshall Poe writes, for example, that in the 150,000 years during which speech was the only medium or network, its accessibility was high because nearly everyone could speak and listen.

Marshall Poe explained how he did this with one of the two volumes of his prosopographical study of the Russian elite in the early modern period.

Marshall Poe was upset that I hadn't included a copyright page on the e-book I sent him.

Marshall Poe founded New Books in History in 2007, and the New Books Network in 2011; in 2014 resigning his tenured professorship to work on it full time.

Marshall Poe invites volunteers who are knowledgeable about a subject to conduct "radio interviews" with authors of new books in that subject area.