Dr Mulvin has published widely on the history of media, technology, and culture. His book, Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In looks at the ways institutions enact and maintain their standards through human labour, embodied performance, and the materialisation of abstract ideas in physical things, images, and living models. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, becoming standards with which they build new infrastructures. These “proxies” carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. In Proxies, Dr Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes.
Dr Mulvin’s other research publications include a history of “night modes” in mobile screens, a media-theoretical treatment of atomic timekeeping, and a history of American colour television standards. He has investigated the domestication of computing in the 1990s, particularly the ways computing, code, and infrastructure were explained to vulnerable publics. This includes a (recovered) history of the Y2K crisis, as well as collaborative projects on the intersection of "viral cultures" in the histories HIV and computing, undertaken with Cait McKinney and funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is currently at work on a book about media, technology, and anger.