SPEAKER: An Evening with Cory Doctorow

Doctorow will participate in a moderated conversation with a Notre Dame faculty member. The event will conclude with a book signing.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. A longtime contributor to leading magazines, websites and newspapers, he serves as a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group defending freedom in technology law, policy and standards. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also affiliated with the MIT Media Lab and the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science as Visiting Professor of Practice. In 2007, he served as Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. He was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame (2020), received the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award (2022), the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement (2024), and in 2025 began his term as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, delivering keynotes in Ithaca and New York City.

His novels, translated into dozens of languages, are published by Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus, Titan Books and HarperCollins (UK). He has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His influence on speculative fiction and digital rights continues to earn international recognition.

His recent books include Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025); Picks & Shovels (2025); The Bezzle (2024); Red Team Blues (2023); Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin, 2022); and The Internet Con (2023), a definitive work on interoperability and antitrust reform. Earlier titles include Attack Surface (2020), Poesy the Monster Slayer (2020), How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2020), Radicalized (2019), Walkaway(2017) and the YA graphic novel In Real Life (2014). His New York Times bestseller Little Brother (2008) remains a cornerstone of YA dystopian literature and continues to be taught worldwide. Its sequel, The Lost Cause (2023), explores climate activism and social change.

He publishes daily essays at Pluralistic.net, examining monopoly power, digital policy and the economics of creativity. He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer company OpenCola and serves on the boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund and the Metabrainz Foundation. A sought-after keynote speaker, Doctorow continues to engage global audiences on platform decay (“enshittification”), creative rights and the future of the open internet.

Doors open at 4:30 p.m., and seating is first come, first served.

Hosted by the Franco Institute