Tim Wu to deliver 2026 Walter Harding Lecture

Tim Wu (Image provided)

Tim Wu, an author, policy advocate, and law professor, will give the 2026 Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo on Wednesday, September 30, at 4:30 p.m. in Doty Recital Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public. Prior to his talk on Wednesday, Wu will appear on WXXI’s Connections with Evan Dawson at noon. 

Following the lecture, Wu will sign copies of his most recent book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (2025). Technology journalist Karen Hao describes Wu’s book as “Essential reading for anyone looking for the recipe to rebalance the vast inequality in our society and to create a thriving economy that works for everyone.” Legal scholar Lina Khan, former chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and current chair of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, calls it “A vital book for these troubled times.”

Currently the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University, Wu played a key role in crafting competition and antitrust policies for the Biden administration, where he was appointed Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy in 2021. As a longtime analyst of the media and technology sectors who has focused on the effects of monopoly power, he is credited with coining the term “net neutrality” in 2002.

Wu has also been a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has published in Slate, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post.

His previous books include The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018), The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2017), The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2011), and, with Jack Goldsmith, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (2006).

The Department of English and Creative Writing’s yearly Harding Lecture honors the life and legacy of SUNY Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding (1917–1996). Harding, one of the 20th century’s foremost scholars of Henry David Thoreau, taught in SUNY Geneseo’s English department from 1956 to 1982. The lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Harding family.