June 30, 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter June 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter June 2025

Welcome to the 51st 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

The next remote session of the Working Group on the History of Media Studies will be Wednesday, September 17, 14:00–15:00 UTC (10am–11am EDT)—devoted to a working paper by member Angela Xiao Wu. Details, a Zoom link, and the paper download will be added to the Working Group page soon.

Hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), the Working Group Open to anyone interested in the history of the media studies fields. Instructions to join 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: História dos Estudos de Comunicação no Mundo de Língua Portuguesa

• [See link for Portuguese, Spanish, and English versions of the call] This symposium will give participants an opportunity to map, critique, and celebrate the histories of communication studies in the Portuguese-speaking world—including Portugal, Brazil, Portuguese-speaking African countries (PALOP), East Timor, Macau, and the diasporas—by inquiring into how the dynamics of colonialism, post-colonialism, dictatorships, and globalization have shaped the field. We have a twofold commitment: to decentre dominant narratives, highlighting epistemologies, institutions, and marginalized figures; and to connect the multiple Portuguese-speaking world traditions, exploring transatlantic dialogues and tensions and resistances. We encourage papers that explore connections among Portugal Africa, Brazil, East Timor, and Macau, as well as connections with other countries and regions in the “Global South.”
• Conference dates: 11 and 12 December 2025
• Deadline: 30 July 2025
• More details

2. Call for Papers: Harold Lasswell and the Return of Propaganda: The Centenary of Propaganda Technique in the World War**

• Among the important events related to propaganda research whose tradition re-emerged in these first three decades of the 20th century, one stands out as a turning point: the first doctoral thesis on the subject, defended by political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1926 at the University of Chicago, which also celebrates its centenary. Published the following year, Propaganda Technique in the World War became the pioneering landmark in academic studies on war propaganda and transformed its author into the most important American expert on the subject for many years. This Esferas dossier celebrates not only the centenary of Harold Lasswell's thesis but also the approaching centenary of propaganda studies, founded on the need to understand this product of the media and which, despite its multiple facets, continues to present itself as an urgent problem to be interpreted in contemporary times.
• Deadline: 15 December 2025
• More details

3. The Journal

Last month History of Media Studies published an “Up from the Stacks” special section on the U.S. philosopher Susanne Langer’s reflections on film:

• Jefferson Pooley and Sue Curry Jansen, “A Note on Langer: An Introduction to the Susanne Langer on Film Special Section”
• Susanne K. Langer, “A Note on the Film” (1953)
• Courtenay Wyche Beinhorn, “Susanne Langer’s Film Theory: Elaboration and Implications” (1974)
• Tereza Hadravova, “Film as a Dream of the Modern Man: Interpretation of Susanne Langer’s ‘Note on the Film’” (2020, updated)

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.

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. Adams, Michael. "'American Speech': The Columbia Years." American Speech 100, no. 2 (2025): 141--52. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-11868145.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] Magazine or journal? That was the fundamental question when its first editors--Louise Pound, Kemp Malone, and Arthur Kennedy-- released American Speech to W. Cabell Greet, of Barnard College, and Columbia University Press.1 And it wasn't settled. That is, magazine elements and an interest in attracting general readers as well as scholars led the new editorial regime to retain elements of the original American Speech into its second period, even as it became more scholarly. Toward the end of the Columbia University period, when John Algeo assumed the editorship, he and his associates, James W. Hartman and A. M. Kinloch, noted that "Inescapably, American Speech is an academic publication, but one that has striven to escape the worst curses of academic writing--dullness and obfuscation." Through its first few decades, American Speech expressed joie de vivre typical of the decade in which it was founded: "We will try to live up to our reputation," the new editors wrote, "of being, as Thomas Pyles has put it, the 'raciest of scholarly journals.'"2 The journal attempted to defeat dullness, especially, by editing that ensured "sound scholarship, engagingly presented," but by other means, as well.

2. Arnold-Forster, Tom. Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215211/walter-lippmann.

   ABSTRACT: Walter Lippmann (1889--1974) was among the most influential and wide-ranging political writers in modern America. As both a journalist and political theorist, he shaped ideas about liberalism and democracy, the nature of public opinion, US power and empire, and the roles of journalists, experts, and citizens. Tom Arnold-Forster provides a bold historical reassessment of Lippmann's intellectual life, offering fresh perspectives on a career at the intersection of daily news and democratic theory. This incisive book shows how Lippmann helped define the public debates of American liberalism from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. By exploring his ideas in their historical context, Arnold-Forster challenges the claim that Lippmann was primarily a theorist of expertise and technocracy. Instead, Lippmann emerges as a strikingly political thinker, public-facing and multifarious, who focused on what politics meant and how it worked in modern democracies. Covering subjects from press freedom to urban reform to economic and foreign policy, while tracing the evolution from his early liberal socialism to later conservative liberalism, this book explores Lippmann's thought as reflecting the protean character of liberal politics and the crises and paradoxes of democracy. Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography is a richly historical account of a complex political thinker. Lippmann's ideas played a formative role in the twentieth century and resonate powerfully with our fraught present.

3. Coëgnarts, Maarten, and Joseph P. Magliano. "Cognitivism in Film and Media Studies." Projections 19, no. 1 (2025): 1--15. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2025.190101.

   ABSTRACT: As we assume our roles as editors of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, we take this opportunity to reflect upon the nature of cognitivism in the study of the moving image. We reflect upon five areas of scholarship that are demonstrative of the wide range of epistemological approaches that represent our field, and in doing so affirm our commitment to the pluralistic nature of the cognitive studies of the moving image. We invite scholars who are committed to the rigorous investigation of the psychological experiences involved in the production or reception of the moving image to contribute to Projections, and in doing so advance the field.

4. Comor, Edward. "Communication, Bias, and Survival: Harold Innis' Final Course." Canadian Journal of Communication 50, no. 2 (2025): 324--47. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjc-2024-0073.

   ABSTRACT: Background: Shortly before Harold Innis' death in November 1952, Tom Easterbrook took over teaching Innis' signature course on communications at the University of Toronto, making it both Innis' final course as well as the first course taught on Innis.Analysis: This article discusses lectures prepared by Tom Easterbrook for Harold Innis' signature course on communications.Conclusions and implications: In his effort to explain Innis' search for a unifying thesis in the social sciences, Easterbrook stressed aspects of his approach that were of great interest to Innis, especially at the end of his life, including several insights that have since been neglected or forgotten. Among these, Easterbrook elaborated upon Innis' references to disequilibrium, his use of juxtapositions and ideal-types, and Innis' concerns regarding bias, civilization, survival, and the prospectively strategic role played by values.

5. Cooper, Tom. Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. New York: Connected Editions, 2025.

   ABSTRACT: In the age of Artificial Intelligence, social media, and anti-social media, arguably the two thinkers who most alerted us to the real "influencers" of our day -- the media and their predecessors -- were the Canadian "wisdom weavers", Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. This book is the first to comprehensively chronicle their intertwined lives; heated, yet fertile relationship; controversial, inspirational thought; and worldwide legacies, which have increasing relevance to the vexing problems of our century. In so doing, this volume also serves as a cogent interpreter of our historical and current relationship with media, and a guide for how we may best employ technology and media literacy for pro-social, if not world-saving purposes.

6. Gross, Larry. "Translating LGBT Research into Politics." Journal of Applied Communication Research 53, no. 3 (2025): 230--34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2025.2495575.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] Last Fall, I received an inquiry from Heather Zoller, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Communication Research, who was planning a forum on different ways that scholars 'translate' communication research insights into practice, including ways that do not typically receive much attention in journals. This struck a chord with me, as I had recently written a piece for an anthology on public scholarship in communication (Gross, 2024). The invitation to participate in this forum offered me an opportunity to expand on some things that I had discussed in that essay, at greater length and detail. The particular examples of 'translation' that I have in mind here relate to my experiences as an academic researcher simultaneously engaged in public activism on matters of current relevance and urgency; in this case, the LGBT movement of the latter quarter of the previous century.

7. Lauer, Laurens, and Lucas Graves. "How to Grow a Transnational Field: A Network Analysis of the Global Fact-Checking Movement." New Media & Society 27, no. 6 (2025): 3505--23. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241227856.

   ABSTRACT: The worldwide fact-checking movement has grown rapidly over the last decade and achieved remarkable prominence. This study investigates that global movement as a case of deliberate institution-building to consolidate a new transnational field. We use a comprehensive network analysis of the first eight years of the annual Global Fact conference to ask how fact-checkers grew their young field, examining the roles of leading practitioners as well as "meta-level" organizations like the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). We identify an elite tier shaping the development of the field, whose membership aligns with other markers of leadership. We show how these organizations play either internally or externally directed brokerage roles, reflecting the characteristic tension in emerging fields between maintaining community bonds and cultivating external stakeholders. And we highlight the pivotal role of the IFCN--while showing that certain fact-checking groups act like meta-level organizations, with resources dedicated to field-building and governance.

8. Moreira, Raquel. "The Anti-Black Logic of Mestizaje: Reckoning with Anzaldúa's New Mestiza Legacy." Communication and Race 2, no. 1 (2025): 72--91. https://doi.org/10.1080/28346955.2025.2514270.

   ABSTRACT: Gloria Anzaldúa's new mestiza has been deeply influential in the formation of a Latine communication studies subfield. Her new mestiza, loosely based on José Vasconcelos's La Raza Cósmica, often appears in scholarship as a progressive racial hybrid. Over time, the merging of first Chicanidad and later Latinidad with this vision of mestizaje has endowed Latines with flexible identities supposedly able to disrupt the US Black-white racial binary, allowing, too, that group to act as bridges to diverse communities. Other disciplines, however, have offered important critiques of Anzaldúa's new mestiza legacy, especially in how it summons mestizaje without a proper critique of its racial logic. This essay sheds light on how the new mestiza legacy manifests in Latine communication studies. First, I offer a brief overview of Colonial Mexico's casta system and its historical relationship with mestizaje, followed by Black and Latine critiques of Anzaldúa's use of La Raza Cósmica to conceive her new mestiza. Finally, I provide a review of influential Latine communication studies scholarship in which Anzaldúa's new mestiza legacy shows up in direct and covert ways. Despite intending to highlight the heterogeneity of Latinidad, scholars in Latine communication studies tend to conceive it as "brownness," evading its relationship to Blackness. I argue that examining and intervening on this legacy is paramount for Latine communication studies scholars to stand in solidarity with Black communities in Latin/e America.

9. Ngomba, Teke. "Theorizing Political Campaign Communication in Africa: Reflections on the Relevance and Legacy of Jay Blumler." In Public Communication in Freefall: Revisiting the Work of Jay Blumler, edited by Stephen Coleman, Frank Esser, Julie Firmstone, Katy Parry, and Chris Paterson, 169--86. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-83364-9_8.

   ABSTRACT: This chapter reflects on the legacy and relevance of Jay Blumler for political communications scholarship by examining the applicability of the systems framework of political communication in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The chapter presents an overview of the theoretical status and prospects of political campaign communication scholarship in SSA and identifies the ways in which analyses of the practices, changes and consequences of political campaign communication in SSA can be deepened by the adoption of a systems framework. Following these, the chapter outlines how the systems framework of political communication fits into, buttresses and challenges ongoing discussions about the de-Westernization of media and communications studies in Africa. In doing so, the chapter concludes that the cross-cultural relevance of the systems framework in political campaign communications scholarship constitutes a useful example that is needed to provide some necessary nuance in the raging debate about the inapplicability of "Western" theories in non-Western contexts.

10. Pooley, Jefferson, and Sue Curry Jansen. "A Note on Langer: An Introduction to the Susanne Langer on Film Special Section." History of Media Studies 5 (May 10, 2025): 1--8. https://doi.org/10.32376/d895a0ea.d27d1346.

    ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] The American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (1895--1985) came of age when mass media--film and radio--were still in their formative stages. World War I would establish their strategic significance and prioritize their technological development. Sustained scholarly analysis of the popular culture that they produced, did not, however, emerge in the U.S. until the 1950s. While much of Langer's work focused on aesthetics, the "popular artists of the screen, the jukebox, the shop-window, and the picture magazine" did not attract her fierce, penetrating attention. She made an exception just once, for film, which she heralded as a "new poetic mode"--but in a mere five pages, as an appendix to a 1953 book on art. We reprint "A Note on the Film" here, together with a pair of essay-commentaries on Langer's fragment, one from 1974 and the other 2020. The book to which it was appended, Feeling and Form (1953), is a masterwork--a philosophically confident, richly informed, and nuanced tour, medium by medium, through the arts: sculpture, painting, poetry, music, dance, and drama. That book, in turn, was a sequel to Langer's surprise 1941 bestseller Philosophy in a New Key, which developed its core argument through the example of music.

11. Pruitt, Marie. "Journals as Disciplinary Archives: A Linguistic Corpus Analysis of Technical Communication Quarterly Abstracts, 1992--2023." Technical Communication Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2025): 373--85. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2025.2490507.

    ABSTRACT: Although archives are common in technical and professional communication (TPC) research, disciplinary reviews are not typically characterized as archival. By examining a key disciplinary archive, Technical Communication Quarterly, this article argues for an understanding of disciplinary reviews as archival research through a corpus analysis of 633 abstracts published between 1992 and 2023. This study offers a macro view of the choices authors make through an analysis of two key features: self-referential descriptors and verb collocates.

12. Sheehan, Desmond. "Religious Foundations of Musikwissenschaft: Church Music, Politics, and Education at the University of Berlin, circa 1820." History of Humanities 10, no. 1 (2025): 249--77. https://doi.org/10.1086/734371.

    ABSTRACT: This article is the first extensive study of music's entrance into the modern research university. Noting recent insights in the history of religion and new institutional studies, it emphasizes the ideological complexity of emerging institutions in nineteenth-century Berlin. In the wake of Napoleon's occupation of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher approved a series of new institutions devoted to reviving music education and religious practices supposedly in decline. One example was the Royal Institute for Church Music (established in 1822), which offered an instructional program for singers and organists. In 1829, the University of Berlin created its first professorships in music for Carl Friedrich Zelter and Adolf Bernhard Marx, who sought to merge the institute with the university's ethos of Bildung. The article details how these institutions negotiated tensions between the state and its Protestant constituency at a time when an absolutist empire was giving ground to new, liberal forms of governance.

13. Torrado-Morales, Susana, Rocío Zamora-Medina, Maribel Olmos, and Filipa Subtil. "Citation Patterns, the Matilda Effect and Gender Bias in Communication & Media Studies Scientific Output in Ibero-America (1980-2022)." Communication & Society 38, no. 1 (2025): 128--45. https://doi.org/10.15581/003.38.1.011.

    ABSTRACT: This article analyses diachronically the role of women in the field of communication & media studies in Ibero-America by studying the presence or absence of women in the bibliography of a selection of articles taken from 60 communication academic journals in 9 countries (Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) between 1980 and 2022. This study measures the degree of visibility of female scientists and their contribution and compares it statistically to that of their male counterparts by quantifying from a gender perspective the citation patterns of authors of the 484 scientific articles included in the study. The findings showed that the visibility of the female researchers-authors increased over time. Furthermore, an over-citation of publications by male researchers was also found. Last, in one of the periods analysed, in the years between 1996-2010, gender homophily was found, i.e., female researchers tended to cite more women than men during this period.

14. Valdivia, Angharad N. "Complicated Utopias: Latinx in Mainstream Media." Journalism & Communication Monographs 27, no. 2 (June 2025): 127--37. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219983251329874.

    ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] The year is 2025. What a moment to reflect on Latinx media studies. In this moment, Latinx are visible in a range of media discourses and platforms. Whereas the focus on the "sensational Latina" (Valdivia, 2020) continues unabated in Hollywood, in traditional news, legacy media, and throughout digital culture, Latinx are currently being framed within the Trump administration's anti-migration policies. Never mind that Latinx are not the only migrants who travel to the United States and never mind that most Latinx are long time U.S. citizens. We still receive the bulk of the finger pointing, discursively constructed as the suspect migrant group by an administration carrying out an ethnic cleansing project--disregarding ethics, laws, and economics (Ozturk, 2025).