December 12, 2022

History of Media Studies Newsletter December 2022

Welcome to the 24th 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 new 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 published works and members’ working papers. 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, December 21

Wednesday, December 21, 15:00-16:30 UTC (10am-11:30am EDT)

Readings for discussion:

• Michael J. Apter, “Cybernetics: A Case Study of a Scientific Subject-Complex” (1970)
• Alexander Soytek, “Foucault’s Reception of the Information Discourse, 1948-1971”

For the Zoom link and reading downloads, 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. ESHHS Early Career Award
   • The European Society for the History of the Human Sciences, together with the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JHBS) encourages early career researchers to submit their papers for the Early Career Award. The winning paper can be submitted to JHBS. If accepted after additional review, it will be published with a notice indicating that it is the winner of the ESHHS Early Career Award. The Publisher will then provide an honorarium of US $500 to the award recipient. All students are eligible to be considered for the Award, as are all researchers having completed their PhD no more than 5 years previous to the date of submission.
   • Deadline: 15 November 2022
   • More details
2. CFP: ICA Preconference on the Legacies of Elihu Katz
   • Elihu Katz (1926–2021) was a peerless scholar, colleague, mentor, administrator, and friend to many in the field of communication. His passing has left the field with an absence that calls out for remembrance and for scholarly consideration. This one-day, all-plenary preconference will create a space for scholarly exchange on Katz’s life, works, and themes—a forum, in other words, for active, critical engagement with his legacy for the field. The preconference invites presenters to explore, critique, and extend Katz’s contributions to communication scholarship. Some will situate Katz’s legacies in pertinent historical contexts; others will use his work to imagine media futures; still others will consider Katz’s many roles (teacher, institution-builder, broadcast pioneer, mentor).
   • Deadline: 20 December 2022
   • More details
3. Call for Papers: Special Issue of Human Communication Research
   • Human Communication Research (HCR) historically has been, and remains today, an important outlet for projects that develop, advance, and critique communication theory using social science methods (broadly defined). The purpose of this special issue is to highlight and celebrate that key part of HCR‘s mission (i.e., innovative theory development) on its 50th birthday both by taking stock and looking forward. Authors are invited to submit proposals for papers that advance our theoretical understanding of communication. Rather than provide literature reviews, these proposals should focus on theory development that will offer a roadmap for scholars to enhance our understanding of communication in ways that are both cognizant of our changing communication landscapes and that are inclusive with regard to issues relevant to our global and diverse societies.
   • Deadline: 15 November 2022
   • More details
4. CFP: Eighth Annual Conference on the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS)
   • This two-day conference of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), at Uppsala University in Sweden, will bring together researchers working on the history of post-World War II social science. It will provide a forum for the latest research on the cross-disciplinary history of the post-war social sciences, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology as well as related fields like area studies, communication studies, history, international relations, law, and linguistics. The conference aims to build upon the recent emergence of work and conversation on cross-disciplinary themes in the postwar history of the social sciences.
   • Deadline: 3 February 2023
   • More details
5. CFP: Society for U.S. Intellectual History
   • The 2023 Society for U.S. Intellectual History annual conference will be held in Denver, Colorado, November 9-11, 2023. The site for the conference is the Curtis Hotel right in the heart of downtown. The conference theme is “Utopia/Dystopia: Intellectual Landscapes of Dreams and Disasters.” We invite submissions that respond to the conference theme or that deal with any other aspect of U.S. intellectual history or the teaching of U.S. intellectual history.
   • Deadline: 15 April, 2023
   • More details
6. CFP: The 24th International Conference on the History of Concepts.
   • The 24rd International Conference on the History of Concepts brings together scholars from all disciplines interested in conceptual history. It offers a platform for interdisciplinary exchange on the problems and practice of the history of concepts and fosters the international network of conceptual historians. Although the conference gathers a broad community of conceptual historians regardless of their topic and region of interest, this year we would like to encourage reflecting on concepts in a localized and/or spatialized manner. The point of departure is for us the very locality where the conference takes place, Eastern Europe. However, its spatialized condition has a much broader, global, and perhaps universal reach, characterizing various tensions and differentials of the global space of conceptual transfers and their impact on historical processes.
   • Deadline: 30 March 2023
   • More details

3. New Publications

Works listed here are (1) newly published, (2) new to the bibliography, and/or (3) newly available in an open access (OA) format.

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

1. Falkof, Nicky. “Cultural Studies in South Africa, or Not.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2023): 16-21.
2. Müggenburg, Jan. “Bats in the Belfry: On the Relationship of Cybernetics and German Media Theory.” Canadian Journal of Communication 42, no. 3 (2017): 467-484.
3. Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
4. Malherek, Joseph. “Rockefeller’s Radio: Lazarsfeld and Mass Communications Research.” In Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968, 167-198. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022.
5. Sloane, Julie and Krippendorff, Kaihan. “Klaus Krippendorff, Ph.D., Pioneer of Content Analysis and Cybernetics, Dies at 90.” Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (2022).
6. Attridge, John. “Remembrance of Telephony Past: What Proust Made of the Phone.” Psyche (2022).
7. Fedorov, Alexander. “Media Education Around the World: Brief History.” Acta Didactica Napocensia 1, no. 2 (2008): 56-68.
8. Eagleton, Terry. Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.