"The medium is the message," coined in a converted coach house on Queen's Park Crescent

Marshall McLuhan's Toronto

The media theorist behind "the medium is the message" and "the global village" wasn't born in Toronto — but his entire career, and the ideas that made him famous, were built at the University of Toronto.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1967 — Marshall McLuhan, 1967 — Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons licensed

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton in 1911 — not a Torontonian by birth, but the University of Toronto is where his career, and his fame, were made.

St. Michael's College

McLuhan joined the English department at St. Michael's College, U of T's federated Catholic college, in 1946, and remained there for the rest of his working life, becoming a full professor in 1952. It was at St. Michael's, working alongside historian Edmund "Ted" Carpenter and others associated with what became known as the "Toronto School" of communication theory, that McLuhan developed the ideas that made him internationally famous in the 1960s.

The Coach House

In 1963, U of T established the Centre for Culture and Technology and named McLuhan its founding director. It operated out of a converted coach house on Queen's Park Crescent, behind the university library, which became a legendary seminar space where McLuhan held court for two decades. It was during this Toronto tenure that he published The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), the book that gave the world "the medium is the message" and "the global village." McLuhan died in Toronto on December 31, 1980, and U of T's Coach House Institute was later renamed the Marshall McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology in his honour.

Sources

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