Derrick de Kerckhove (born 1944) is the author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was the Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology from 1983 until 2008.
In January 2007, he returned to Italy for the project and Fellowship "Rientro dei cervelli", in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Naples Federico II where he teaches "Sociologia della cultura digitale" and "Marketing e nuovi media". He was invited to return to the Library of Congress for another engagement in the Spring of 2008.[1] He is research supervisor for the PhD Planetary Collegium M-node[2] directed by Francesco Monico. Since 2008 he oversees global art projects for Solstizio, co-founded by the artist Giuseppe Stampone.
In July 2015 with Fred Forest,[3] Maurice Benayoun,[4] Tom Klinkowstein[5] and other art people, thinkers and philosophers, he participated to Natan Karczmar's seminar ArtComTec.[6]
De Kerckhove received his Ph.D in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Doctorat du 3e cycle in Sociology of Art from the University of Tours (France) in 1979. He was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology from 1972 to 1980, and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author.
He edited Understanding 1984 (UNESCO, 1984) and co-edited with Amilcare Iannucci, McLuhan e la metamorfosi dell'uomo (Bulzoni, 1984) two collections of essays on McLuhan, culture, technology and biology. He also co-edited with Charles Lumsden The Alphabet and the Brain (Springer Verlag, 1988), a book which scientifically assesses the impact of the Western alphabet on the physiology and the psychology of human cognition. Another publication, La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne appeared in France in December 1990 and in Italy the following year (Feltrinelli, 1991).
Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Bosch & Keuning, 1991) addresses the differences between the effects of television, computers and hypermedia on corporate culture, business practices and economic markets. The Skin of Culture (Somerville Press, 1995) is a collection of essays on the new electronic reality which stayed on Canadian best-sellers lists for several months. It was translated into a dozen languages including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Polish and Slovenian.