Early Radio, Intellectuals, and Cultures of Listening

Description

A lecture by CRASSH Visiting Fellow Dr David Hendy (University of Westminster)

How, in its formative years between the wars,  did British broadcasting draw on the intellectual ideas and cultural practices of the age? By what means were some of the key ideas in science, politics and the arts in the first three decades of the twentieth century ‘translated’ via the disembodied voice into comprehensible ‘programmes’ for a broader public? And did this new phenomenon, ‘broadcasting’, redefine the public sense of what constituted ‘knowledge’?  In this lecture, David Hendy examines the personal stories of the very earliest broadcasters – both those in front of the microphone, such as Oliver Lodge, Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, and those working behind-the-scenes, such as Lance Sieveking and Hilda Matheson. He discusses the key influences on their work, and the ways in which their programmes might have helped develop new categories of intellectual life as they were heard, and sometimes debated, in millions of homes around the country.   

 
All welcome.  No need to register. 

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