COMMColloquium, Distinguished Lecturer

Redeeming the Vast Wasteland: How Renegade Scholars Invented Media Studies, 1957-1996

Susan Douglas, Professor, Communication Studies, The University of Michigan

2pm in 102 Mann

Reception to follow in the Hub

In the 1950s and 1960s, the notion that any self-respecting scholar in the humanities would study the media was beneath contempt, preposterous.  The writer and intellectual Dwight MacDonald famously asserted that popular culture is "a debased, trivial culture” and that “the masses, debauched by several generations of this sort of thing, in turn come to demand trivial and comfortable cultural products."  Newton Minow, the chairman of the FCC, dismissed television in 1963 as "a vast wasteland."  This was hardly surprising, given that the programming on offer featured a talking horse, Munsters, and animated singing chipmunks.  Sentiments about the media, and especially television, were similar in Britain. Yet by the mid- and late 1970s, media studies had emerged, on both sides of the Atlantic and was thriving field by the mid-1980s.  How did this happen, why did it happen, and who were the pioneering scholars who defied derision to make it happen?  This talk draws from a work-in-progress on an intellectual history of media studies in the U.S. and Britain, seeks to answer these questions, and lays out the considerable difficulties in tackling such a project.  And how does a field born this way, out of the forces of marginalization, fifty years ago, still bear the burdens of these biases and, if so, what are those consequences? 

Susan Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. She is author of Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work Is Done (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010); The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermines Women (with Meredith Michaels, The Free Press, 2004); Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Times Books, 1999), which won the Hacker Prize in 2000 for the best popular book about technology and culture, Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (Times Books, 1994; Penguin, 1995), and Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins, 1987). She received her B.A. from Elmira College (Phi Beta Kappa) and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. She is the 2009 recipient of the Leonardo Da Vinci Prize, the highest honor given by the Society for the History of Technology to an individual who has greatly contributed to the history of technology through research, teaching, publications, and other activities. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband and daughter.