History of Media Studies Newsletter August 2026

Welcome to the 61st edition of the History of Media Studies Newsletter. The monthly email, assembled by Dave Park, Jeff Pooley, and Pete Simonson, maintains a loose affiliation with the History of Media Studies journal and the Working Group on the History of Media Studies. Please contact us with any questions, suggestions, or items.

1. Working Group on the History of Media Studies

Join us for the next remote session devoted to discussing working papers with authors. Hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). Open to anyone interested in the history of the media studies fields. Instructions to join are here.

Wednesday, September 16

Wednesday, September 16, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EDT)

Reading for discussion:

• Andrew Williams, “The ILET Seminar of 1977 and the Entanglement of Academic and Political Networks in the Era of NWICO“ (working paper)

For the Zoom link and the reading download, visit the Working Group page. Instructions for joining the group are here. Questions? Contact us

2. Conferences, Calls & Announcements

If you have a call or announcement relevant to the history of media studies, please contact us.

1. CFP: Intersections of psychological research and psychotherapeutic practices

• This special issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences seeks to contribute to the emerging historiography of psychotherapy, focusing on the “Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices.” This topic originates from the 10th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology (University of Lübeck, 2025), which brought together scholars drawing on historical epistemology and related approaches that integrate the philosophy and history of science to analyze how knowledge and therapeutic practices concerning the psyche have been co-constructed across experimental, clinical and cultural contexts. By examining these intertwined epistemic and normative dimensions, this special issue aims to understand the history of psychotherapy as a crossroads of reciprocal production and continual transformation among psychological knowledge, research practices, techniques of the self, social institutions, and modern forms of subjectivity.
• Deadline: 30 September 2026
• More details

2. Third International History of Knowledge Conference: “Decentering the History of Knowledge”

• The third History of Knowledge Conference will take place in Utrecht on 25-27 August 2027. The conference follows the successful first international History of Knowledge Conference in Porto in 2023, and the second edition, hosted by the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in 2025. Utrecht University is home of the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Sciences and the Humanities, and the field’s flagship Journal for the History of Knowledge. In recent years, history of knowledge has developed into a vibrant field of interdisciplinary research and scholarship around the globe. The History of Knowledge Conference will gather scholars with a diversity of backgrounds to further develop the field and its impact on other disciplines and society. Fostering inclusivity, we welcome all scholars working on the history of knowledge in the broadest sense. The central theme of the conference will be: “Decentering the History of Knowledge.”
• Conference dates: 25–27 August 2027
• Deadline: A call for papers will be published in the Fall of 2026.
• More details

3. ESHHS Early Career Award

• All students who presented a paper at either the 2025 Paris or 2026 Vienna conferences are eligible to submit their paper. Early career researchers who completed their PhD no more than 5 years prior to the date of submission are also eligible to submit their paper as long as they do not hold a permanent/tenured university position (or equivalent). Candidates must be the sole presenter of the paper at the conference and the sole or first author of the paper. They must be a member of ESHHS at the time of submission, and cannot be awarded the ECA if they have won the Cheiron Young Scholar Award for the same paper.
• Deadline: 15 October 2026
• More details

4. CFP: New Blindspots: The Audience Commodity, Audience Labour, and Dallas Smythe 50 Years On

• Fifty years ago, in 1977, Canadian political economist Dallas Smythe published what would become perhaps his most influential article: “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism.” Smythe’s suggestion that Marxist analysis generally failed to offer a political economic account of the role of media and communication provoked a pitched scholarly discussion, referred to contemporaneously as the “blindspot debate.” Recognising the legacy and continued influence of Dallas Smythe’s work, this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) commemorates the 50th anniversary of the blindspot debate while theorising the contemporary suitability of the idea of the audience commodity for understanding communication and technology today. We welcome proposals for original articles reflecting on Smythe’s legacy or applying his ideas to contemporary communicative phenomena.
• Deadline: 30 September 2026
• More details

3. The Journal

History of Media Studies encourages submissions (en español) on the history of research, education, and reflective knowledge about media and communication—as expressed through academic institutions; through commercial, governmental, and non-governmental organizations; and through “alter-traditions” of thought and practice often excluded from the academic mainstream.

• The journal is soliciting proposals for a special section on the histories of publishing in the media, communication, and film studies fields. The focus of the special section is on the role of publishers—both commercial and nonprofit—in these fields’ development. Proposals of around 1000 words, including references, should be sent by September 15, 2026. See the CFP for more details.

4. New Publications

Works listed here are newly published, or new to the bibliography.

The History of Communication Research Bibliography is a project of the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives (ASCLA) at the University of Pennsylvania.

1. Augustyn, Kamila. "Changing the subject or embracing change: Book and Publishing Studies conferences over the last 30 years (1993–2024)." Journal of Scholarly Publishing 57, no. 3 (2026): 325--397. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2024-0144.

   ABSTRACT: This article examines three international conferences within the field of book and publishing studies. The origins of the first date back to 1993, following the establishment of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in 1991. While SHARP has gradually expanded its thematic scope over the years, it remains firmly anchored in the traditions of book history. The Common Ground (CG) and By the Book (BTB) conferences—established a decade and over two decades later, in 2003 and 2014, respectively—reflect a more contemporary orientation, engaging with the publishing industry through media- and business-oriented frameworks and drawing on disciplines such as sociology, library and information science, and management.A total of 6481 papers were presented at the conferences analysed. The events attracted 4268 speakers out of 5407 attendees from seventy-nine countries and over 1200 academic and research institutions. The majority of individuals were affiliated with institutions in high-income and/or English-speaking countries. Regions with the least representation included South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. A mere 3 per cent of the attendees participated in at least two of the conferences under study.The SHARP conference is identified as the largest in the field, Common Ground as a medium-scale event—though operating at a smaller scale in recent years — and BTB as a small-scale conference. The most cohesive communities formed around BTB and SHARP, where returning speakers accounted for just over and just under 30 per cent of contributors, respectively, and their papers comprised over 50 per cent of all presentations at each conference.

2. Bauer, A. J. "A paradigm displaced: Propaganda analysis within and beyond the field of mass communication." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 238--251. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2671073.

   ABSTRACT: This article tracks the rise of propaganda analysis as a social scientific research paradigm in the early twentieth century, its influence on the progressive media reform movement of the 1940s, and its rightward shift during the Second Red Scare (also known as McCarthyism) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It challenges the prevailing critical historiography of mass communication as a discipline, which tends to narrate the Institute for Propaganda Analysis as the epitome of a critical scholarly paradigm within the field and sees the subsequent behaviorist turn toward quantification as obscuring that field’s political stakes. By emphasizing the political cultural impacts of notions of public opinion shared across and beyond the disciplinary divide, the article calls for reconsidering the animating fictions of contemporary political discourse—namely the existence of a unitary, agential, and hypothetically manipulable public.

3. Colapietro, Vincent M. "Wild signs and sign-mastery: John Durham Peters’s creative appropriation of classical pragmatism." The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 40, no. 1 (2026): 35--52. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.40.1.0035.

   ABSTRACT: In a deep-cutting, far-ranging exploration of the idea of communication John Durham Peters sets dialogue and dissemination in stark contrast. He invokes at critical junctures in his complex argument the classical pragmatists (above all, James, Dewey, and especially Peirce). While Peters in doing so not only illuminates his topic but also shows the salience of the pragmatists to his inquiry, he fails to deploy one of the most important resources in this tradition—the Peircean concept of semiosis (or sign-process). This article addresses that lacuna.

4. Comfort, Ryan N., and Patrick Ferrucci. "Participant, observer, intern, producer: How 70 years of newsroom ethnographies approached “participation” and the epistemology of participant–observer orientations." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 103, no. 3 (2026): 773--797. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990261442899.

   ABSTRACT: After 70 years, little scholarship has systematically examined the spectrum of researcher conceptualizations and enactments of “participation” newsroom ethnographies. While the fields of Anthropology and Sociology have spent the last several decades grappling with researcher–subject relationships, our analysis shows that journalism scholars have yet to embrace their own participatory turn. Through an ethnographic content analysis of participant–observer newsroom research, the present study builds a narrative about the concept of participation and its change over time. We then propose a uniquely journalistic “turn” inspired by the shifting realities of contemporary newmaking and the need to bridge the “research—practice gap.”

5. Fan, Yangliu, Jakob Ohme, and Christoph Neuberger. "Digital turn without digital methods? Mapping the journey of journalism studies." Digital Journalism 14, no. 6 (2026): 1088--1114. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2025.2480106.

   ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen a growing diversity in journalism studies, primarily ascribed to digital transformation in the contemporary context. Analyzing 6,770 publications from the five major journalism journals—Journalism, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism—between 1995 and 2022, we find new evidence that the digital turn is highly visible in journalism studies. Using document co-citation analysis, we first have identified distinct and coherent, yet loosely integrated, research clusters that focus on different journalistic topics, i.e., specialties. Second, we find that digital journalism has not only been integrated into the research agendas within the field but has also formed stand-alone and distinct research clusters. We further show that field structure has developed over the years in response to digital transformation. Yet, digital and computational methods remain in the stark minority compared with the more traditional methods. Our results suggest that journalism studies could benefit from novel inter-cluster communications and methodological innovations.

6. Greenberg, David. "The misadventures of Clyde Miller: Democrats, dictators, and the curse of propaganditis." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 211--219. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2682363.

   ABSTRACT: In 1937, against a backdrop of threats to liberal democracy posed by the rise of totalitarian ideologies and doubts about whether democracy was up to the challenge, Columbia University education professor Clyde Miller founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis to take up what seemed like a vital mission: teaching Americans to recognize deceptive or self-serving messaging and to cultivate what today we might call “media literacy.” Their goal was high-minded and laudable and executed with thought and care. But from the outset, critics identified certain fundamental flaws in Miller’s approach, rooted in the very challenges of fighting propaganda itself. Most important, the IPA’s focus on propaganda could obscure the larger stakes of the global crisis of the 1930s. This essay reflects on the establishing ideals, and ultimately the fatal contradictions, of Miller’s IPA project.

7. Jankowicz, Nina. "The personal toll of the contemporary backlash against disinformation research." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 293--297. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2684548.

   ABSTRACT: Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who became the target of disinformation and harassment after taking on a role in the Biden administration, recounts the personal toll the experience has taken on both her and the broader information integrity research field since 2022.

8. Jones, Paul K. "The Institutes for Propaganda Analysis and Frankfurt School social research on Morningside Heights: A de facto alliance and its legacies." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 220--237. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2671082.

   ABSTRACT: The relationship between the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) and the exiled Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research (FISR) is somewhat enigmatic, despite the two entities’ physical proximity on Morningside Heights during the 1930s and 1940s. This article challenges J. Michael Sproule’s “mutual disinterest” account of that relationship. It demonstrates the influence of Alfred and Elizabeth Lee on the FISR’s Studies in Prejudice project, which anticipated a scenario in the US like the democratic crisis that exists today. Theodor Adorno’s work on demagogic propaganda is particularly indebted to the Lees’ The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches (1939). Detailed archival and textual reconstruction of this relationship is presented. This focuses on the FISR’s plans for a popular manual like The Fine Art and Adorno’s reworking of the IPA’s famous “seven devices” of propaganda technique into a more elaborate theoretical and practical counter-demagogic program. This article also demonstrates that these developments in propaganda studies played a little-recognized role in the well-known tension between Adorno and Paul Lazarsfeld regarding “administrative” and “critical” communications research. Finally, the legacies of this complex history are briefly explored in the context of current debates about research on disinformation.

9. Miller, Lucy J. "Transing public address." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 28, no. 3 (2025): 13--29. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.28.3-4.0013.

   ABSTRACT: Trans people have been absent from much of public address history. Historical figures like French noble, diplomat, and spy Chevalière d'Eon and British doctor James Barry have been subject to skepticism about their trans identities instead of being analyzed as exemplars of trans public address. In rhetorical scholarship, the analysis of trans rhetoric has been limited to a few contemporary examples, with more attention given to efforts to restrict trans rights and discourse surrounding our deaths. Given the limited presence of trans people in rhetoric and public address, I argue for the need to trans public address. Transing public address is built on Yep, Russo, and Allen's concept of transing, in which gender is seen as contingent and frequently being assembled and reassembled, and asks rhetorical scholars to ask "what if" in response to questions around trans inclusion in public address instead of rejecting this inclusion to uphold essentialist understandings of gender.

10. Morris, Charles E., and Pamela VanHaitsma. "Queering pasts and futures of public address." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 28, no. 3-4 (2025): 1--12. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.28.3-4.0001.

    ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] When Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse was published in 2007 by University of South Carolina Press, it constituted the first collective effort to bring queer studies directly into public address and more broadly into rhetorical studies. The project stood on the shoulders of earlier interventions in the discipline of Communication, especially Gay Speak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication (1981) and Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality (1994).1 This earlier scholarship registered LGBTQ lives, past and present—along with research about queer peoples, communities, culture, politics, and their antagonisms—as important topics for Communication research. The courage and marginalization of this foundational scholarship had elicited by the turn of the century intensifying “rhetorical impatience”2 among a new generation of LGBTQ scholars, thus Queering Public Address's aspiration was a wide-ranging intervention.

11. Napoli, Philip M. "From patron to persecutor: The evolution of the US government’s role in disinformation research." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 259--275. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2659270.

    ABSTRACT: Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including legal filings and decisions, executive orders, congressional hearings and testimony, news releases, agency decisions, and government reports, this article documents the ongoing governmental assault on disinformation research. This article assesses these activities through the historical lens of the origins of communications and media research. As this article will illustrate through a synthesis of relevant historical research, the origins of communication and media research as an academic field owe much to federal government initiatives in the 1940s and 1950s to develop a robust domestic research program that focused on issues of propaganda and disinformation. There is, obviously, a tremendous irony inherent in the current efforts by the federal government to dismantle a field of research that it played a central role in creating. This article seeks to understand this dramatic reversal through an analysis of the historical contexts that led to both the mid-twentieth century and early-twenty-first century iterations of propaganda/disinformation research; the key research questions that guided these bodies of work; and the national political dynamics at each of these moments in time.

12. Pickard, Victor. "Ideological steering of US media research: The role of redbaiting in the early communication field." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 252--258. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2671083.

    ABSTRACT: The early US communication field took root during the 1930s and ‘40s upon a rapidly shifting ideological terrain. These years saw several critical threads of communication research rise and fall, while other less critical approaches ascended to become the dominant paradigm of communication research, emphasizing social science methods that consistently found only limited media effects. Although typically narrated as an intellectual/methodological interplay between critical and administrative approaches, early tensions in the field were also ideological, swaying research down a particular trajectory. To understand how certain types of research fell from favor, while others were more readily embraced, it’s instructive to consider an especially effective set of tools used to discipline the discipline that loosely fell under a general strategy: redbaiting.

13. Schiffrin, Anya. "Clyde Miller and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis – Relevant for today: Introduction to a special issue of Journalism History." Journalism History 52, no. 3 (2026): 193--210. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2026.2696255.

    ABSTRACT: This introduction to the Journalism History special issue “Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis” includes a summary of the founding of the IPA at Columbia University and lays out the parallels between today’s backlash against disinformation researchers and the criticisms made of IPA scholars in the 1930s. We also summarize the contributions to the special issue from a range of scholars who discuss contemporary influences on the IPA, the backlash against researchers of the past and today, and the effect this has had on media policy.

14. Topic-Rutherford, Martina. "Forty years after The Velvet Ghetto report – From women’s work to the legitimacy of public relations." Corporate Communications: An International Journal 31, no. 4 (2026): 521--528. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-07-2026-409.

    ABSTRACT: In November 2026, it will be 40 years since the IABC Research Foundation published The Velvet Ghetto: The Impact of the Increasing Percentage of Women in Public Relations and Business Communication in San Francisco, California. In that seminal report, Carolyn G. Cline, Elizabeth L. Toth, Judy Vanslyke Turk, Lynne Masel Walters, Nancy Johnson and Hank Smith set the agenda for a research program studying experiences of women in PR (Cline et al., 1986). Due to its international impact, the report became a foundational text for research on women, gender, status, labor relations and professional recognition in public relations. The report expressed concerns that women's growing presence in public relations was not accompanied by higher salaries or higher status and that women tended to be concentrated in technical rather than managerial roles despite their increased presence (Cline et al., 1986).