Magdalena Zdrodowska is an assistant professor in the Department of Audiovisual Arts at Jagiellonian University. She is an anthropologist, and film and media scholar, who is working at the crossroads of deaf studies, disability studies, and history of technology.

In 2013 she published the book Television on the borderlands [in Polish] devoted to medium of television used as a tool for intercultural communication. Her second book Telephone, cinema and cyborgs. The mutual relations between deafness and technology [in Polish] (2021) concentrates on technologies invented for deaf consumers on one hand,  and the ones hacked, repurposed and regained by the deaf innovators.

Since 2019, she has been a member of the Executive Committee of International Committee for the History of Technology ICOHTEC, and in 2021 she was named Society for the History of Technology SHOT International Scholars for a 2-year term.

She was a principal investigator in projects:

• 2015-2020, The telephone, moving pictures, and cyborgs: mutual relations of the technology and d/Deaf communities in 20th and 21st century; research grant funded by the Polish National Science Center
• 2020, Ear Trumpets in the 20th and 21st Century. Acoustic Amplifiers in the Era of Electricity and Electronics; research grant funded by The State Fund for Rehabilitation of Disabled People

More information about the project leader 

Professor at the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 2014. He was Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar in 2014–15, and Charles Price Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia in 2007–08. He was the President of the International Committee for the History of Technology in 2017–21, and he is a member of SHOT Nominating Committee in 2021-23.