Fonds F0467 - Frank Zingrone fonds

Frank Zingrone, writer and professor, was born in Toronto on 16 August 1933. He was a student at St. Michael's College School in Toronto and attended the University of Western Ontario in London, where he received a BA in Philosophy in 1958. He then obtained a MA in English literature from the University of Toronto in 1961 and a PhD from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 1966. Zingrone was an instructor in the Department of English at SUNY between 1963 and 1966 before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge as an assistant professor of communication, a position he held from 1966 to 1970. In 1971, Zingrone became an assistant professor of humanities at York University, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, co-founding the university's Communications department. He was appointed a senior scholar emeritus in 1994. In addition, Zingrone was associate editor of the "Canadian journal of communication" between 1980 and 1985.

Zingrone's work as a critic, lecturer and academic writer in the area of communications and media produced numerous conference papers, newspaper and journal articles, as well as books including "Who was Marshall McLuhan?" (co-editor, 1995), "Essential McLuhan" (co-editor, 1996), and "The media symplex: at the edge of meaning the age of chaos" (2001). He was a contributor to "On McLuhan: forward through the rearview mirror" (1996) and "Understanding McLuhan" (CD-ROM, 1996). Zingrone was also a poet, with poems published in "The fiddlehead" and "Audit" in the early 1960s. He published two books of poetry, "Traces" (1980) and "Strange attraction" (2000). Frank Zingrone died in Toronto on 13 December 2009.