Prof. Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes
University) - BBC Features, Propaganda
and the Second World War
BBC Features, a relatively new radiogenic form, became a
crucial vehicle in the early years of the Second World War for
articulating a sense of national unity and for providing accounts
of the war that could counteract Nazi propaganda. In this paper I explore
the feature series Shadow of the Swastika alongside other war
features (Terence Horsley's Narvik and Cecil McGivern's Battle
of Britain) examining how the aesthetics of this genre encountered the
politics of the nation at war, the presence of the radio voice, and
the responses of the radio listener.
Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Her most recent book Technology, Literature and Culture was published by Polity Press and she has a monograph forthcoming which is entitled Machine Amusements. Alex's work on radio has appeared in a special issue of Modernist Cultures and in the volume Broadcasting in the Modernist Era.
Journal launch:
The presentation will be followed by the launch of Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music, an emerging postgraduate journal. The editorial board at Riffs are developing a creative and experimental space for writing and thinking about popular music offering an online forum for the publication and hosting of high calibre postgraduate research in the area of popular music studies.
BCMCR
Research Seminars: History, Heritage and Archives - New research in media
history
1600-1730 Wednesday 8 February 2017
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
Dr. Chris
Hill (Birmingham City University) - Peace
and Power: Media, Movements and Democracy in Cold War Britain
This talk
offers an overview of my forthcoming monograph, Peace and Power: Media,
Movements and Democracy in Cold War Britain. The monograph explores
ban the bomb and anti-Vietnam War movements in the context of media history,
focusing in particular on the relationship between radical traditions of
democracy and the rise of television. In doing so, it engages with two
recurring questions in media history: what do advances in communications media
mean for democratic participation in high politics and how do distinctive types
of media condition the very nature of that participation itself? To this
end, the monograph explores the mobilisation of anti-nuclear and -war movements
in relation to information, power and the state. It traces how the
networks of these movements extended into arenas of public life which
themselves were being transformed by television, shaping struggles for social
change among intellectuals, on the streets, in the Labour Party and in the law
courts.
Dr. Charlotte Stevens (Birmingham City University) - The Fanvid Form as Historiography
Fanvids are derived from television and film sources, and approximate the music video in appearance and duration. They are non-commercial fan works, predominantly made by women, which construct creative and critical analyses of existing media and have a history of production dating back to the early 1980s. Jonathan Gray (2010) argues that vids offer a look at a fan’s ‘path through a text’ similar to marginalia; I suggest that vids provide textual evidence of a kind of historical spectatorship – and relationship with home video formats – that is largely unaccounted for in media studies.
About the
speakers:
Dr. Chris
Hill is a Research Fellow for the Centre for Printing History and Culture at
BCU.
Dr. Charlotte Stevens is a Research Assistant with the BCMCR. She earned her PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, where she is now an Associate Fellow.
BCMCR
Research Seminars: History, Heritage and Archives - The history of Digital
Audio Broadcasting (DAB) in the UK
1600-1730 Wednesday 15 February 2017
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
Dr. John P Devlin (BBC Radio 4/ Bournemouth
University) - The role of the BBC and the
commercial radio sector in promoting DAB digital radio in the UK
As of
2017, the DAB platform has been in existence for twenty years but one could
argue its position remains nebulous even though it is a digital format in which
the BBC and the commercial radio sector have placed a huge degree of trust. I
wish to talk about why DAB became an imperative for both sectors, examining the
separate and joint roles of each in promoting DAB, and discuss how this led to
a unique period of cooperation thus representing a major shift in the
historical relationship between both parties.
Dr. JP
Devlin is a producer, reporter and presenter at BBC Radio 4 and has completed a
PhD at the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University.
BCMCR
Research Seminars: History, Heritage and Archives – James Patterson:
Transformations in the Archive (and Archivist)
1600-1730 Wednesday 22 February 2017
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link
In
December 2016, James Patterson retired as Director of the Media Archive Central
England (MACE) after 38 years work in public film archive sector. This event
will offer a reflection on James’ experience in the sector, assessing issues in
the preservation of film culture, covering a period of transformation and
challenge. Discussion and presentation will engage with questions of
public value, policy priorities, between nation and regions and wider issues
for archive practice and culture in general.
About James Patterson:
James worked for nearly 38 years in the public film archives. He joined the cataloguing department of the National Film Archive as a newly qualified librarian in 1979. By the time he left the BFI Archive in 2000 he had moved into the acquisition department as Assistant Documentary Film Officer and for 10 years had been Keeper of Documentary Films with overall responsibility for the non-fiction collections.
As Keeper, James had a liaison role with the regional film archives and carried forward the BFI’s policy to encourage the establishment of a complete network across England. During that time particularly he was closely involved in the establishment of the archives for the South West and for the Midlands. And it was to the Midlands project that he committed the final 17 years of his working life as the founding director of the Media Archive for Central England (MACE).
Alongside the development of MACE, now a well-established feature in the film archive world and in the cultural landscape of the Midlands, James always maintained an active involvement in the development of film as part of the wider archive sector. He was deputy (and acting) chair of Film Archive Forum for a number of years, sat on the executive committees of the regional archive councils in the East and West Midlands for many years and worked with the National Archives on the new Archives Accreditation scheme. In 2013 MACE was one of the first 6 archives to be accredited and remains the only film archive to hold that status.
At the end of December 2016 James retired from the directorship of MACE, a post that has been a senior academic position at the University of Lincoln since the archive settled there in 2011.