David Lyon

Biography

David Lyon is Former Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Educated at the University of Bradford UK, Lyon began in secularization studies, and has been studying surveillance since the mid-1980s. A pioneer in the field of Surveillance Studies, he has produced a steady stream of books – translated in to 18 languages – and articles, starting with The Electronic Eye (1994). The latest is Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (2024). He has led several large collaborative research projects on surveillance, with research funding totalling almost $8 million. His work has been recognized in Canada, Switzerland, the USA and the UK with a number of fellowships, prizes, awards and an honorary doctorate.

Research topics

Professor Lyon’s current main project is a social-historical study of European medieval surveillance, using the motif of the "eye of God" as a common feature of ways to describe surveillance from the C5th to the C21st. The aim, among other things, is to acknowledge some Christian origins of surveillance and trace their secularization and loss of human-centredness through different phases of state formation, technological development and such.