Fred Turner's research and teaching focus on digital media, journalism and the roles played by media in American cultural history.

Turner is the author of two books, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (1996; Revised 2nd ed. 2001). His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries.

Turner’s research and writing have received a number of awards, including a PSP Award for Excellence, for the best book in Communication and Cultural Studies published in 2006 from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers; the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics from the Media Ecology Association; the James W. Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research; and both a Best Paper Award and a Book Award Special Mention from the Communication and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. During the 2007-2008 academic year, he was a Leonore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also worked as a journalist for ten years. His news stories, features and reviews have appeared in venues ranging from the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine to Nature.

Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, in 2002. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.