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Description
This module explores broadcasting as a revolutionary social, political, and cultural institution of twentieth-century modernity. Broadcasting histories typically present national narratives, while media theory often substitutes a narrow range of experience (principally, the Anglo-American experience) for the whole. In this module, we will uncover the history of radio and television in its great diversity, from the dominant US and UK narratives to Nazi Germany, the USSR and postwar East-Central Europe, China and the Global South, while also investigating its impact as a transnational phenomenon. The approach is at once broadly chronological (tracking major developments from the 1920s through the 1980s) and thematic. Major themes include: national broadcasting systems and national identity formation; radio and communities of listening (ethnicity, class, gender); radio, propaganda, and dictatorship; transnational broadcasting and Cold War competition; television and the family ideal: mediating lifestyle in the Cold War; radio, mass culture, and the youth revolution of the 1960s; television, values, and the socialist welfare state; broadcasting and the politics of modernization in the Global South; television, political mobilization, and dissent.
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.
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