March 31, 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter March 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter March 2025

Welcome to the 48th 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 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, May 21

Wednesday, May 21, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EDT)

Aswin Punathambekar (University of Pennsylvania) will join us to talk about a work-in-progress on trajectories of media studies in relation to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora (especially in the US and the UK).

For the Zoom link and the reading download (not yet uploaded), 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. Call for Abstracts: European Communication Research: What, Whence, and Whither?

• In its 50th year, Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research invites us to reconsider what European communication research is – and what it can be. From its start in 1975, the journal’s mission has been to serve as a forum for scholarship and academic debate in the field of communication science and research from a European perspective. But what is in fact a European perspective? The jubilee conference invites us to rethink what constitutes European communication research. The conference offers a moment to rethink what a European perspective could mean for scholarship and what kind of Europe is in fact evoked here. The conference is open to theoretical and empirical approaches. It invites emerging and junior scholars as well as senior faculty to contemplate the peculiar character of European communication research.
• Conference dates: 29–30 September 2025
• Deadline: 15 April 2025
• More details

2. Call for Abstracts: Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis

• In 1937, a small group of scholars and philanthropists founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis at the Columbia Teachers College, to combat what they saw as the grave threat to American democracy posed by propaganda. From 1937 to 1942, the IPA mounted a campaign to educate the American public (and students) on dishonest techniques used in rhetoric and became involved in the movement to develop anti-racist curricula for use in schools. The IPA’s trajectory provides a unique opportunity to examine historical parallels to these present-day developments and debates. We are particularly interested in exploring the history and political economy of media literacy efforts in different countries, comparative media perspectives on anti-racist education efforts, other examples of backlash against scholars and educators in these areas, and historical understandings of truth and manipulation in media and journalism.
• Deadline: 1 May 2025
• More details

3. 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

4. Call for Abstracts: History of the Humanities Focus Area at 2025 History of Knowledge Conference (Lund)

• The History of the Humanities is one of six focus areas in the newly published Call for Papers for the second international History of Knowledge Conference on 8–10 October, 2025, to be held at Lund University, Sweden. The conference is hosted by the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). The History of Knowledge Conference aims to gather scholars from different backgrounds to continue to develop the field of history of knowledge and inspire international collaboration. Confirmed keynote speakers are Robert Darnton (Harvard) and Susanne Schmidt (Berlin).
• Conference dates: 8–10 October 2025
• Deadline: 1 May 2025
• More details

5. Call for Papers: Society for U.S. Intellectual History

• The 2025 S-USIH Annual Conference will be held in Detroit, Michigan, on November 6-8, 2025. This year’s theme invites papers about creativity and renewal; the crossing of borders—of race, gender, class, nationality, religion, and culture—and the hybridized forms that result; the ways in which art, music, and dance become vehicles for intellectual debate and resistance; the nexus of capital, labor, and technology in the modern era; the dreams and failures of mid-twentieth century liberalism and urban policy; and the intersection of religion and social justice. We invite submissions that respond to the conference theme, but also welcome proposals that deal with any other aspect of U.S. intellectual history, broadly defined.
• Conference dates: 6–8 November, 2025
• Deadline: 1 May 2025
• More details

3. The Journal

This month History of Media Studies published a book review and a review essay:

• Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, reviewed by A.J. Bauer
• “The Nowness of Chairing an English Department: A Review Essay of John Guillory’s Professing Criticism and Michael J. Sproule’s Democratic Vernaculars” - Kathleen J. Ryan.

HMS 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. Botello, Nelson Arteaga. "Cultural Sociology in Mexico: Meaning-Making as Hybridization, Power, and Cultural Structure." Cultural Sociology 19, no. 1 (2025): 3--22. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755241234392.

   ABSTRACT: This article analyzes how, at a very early stage, Mexican cultural sociologists explained meaning-making processes using a set of factors external to the cultural sphere and how, more recently, they have emphasized that such meaning-making processes have analytical autonomy. Mexican cultural sociology is marked by a dominant model based on the works of Gramsci, Bourdieu, and the Birmingham School that was built in the late 1970s; this model was derived from the analysis of cultural consumption and reached the peak of its development in the 1990s with the concept of cultural hybridization and efforts to introduce semiotics into cultural interpretation. At the beginning of the 21st century, decolonial theory and the 'strong program' in cultural sociology opened new avenues of reflection in Mexican cultural sociology.

2. Cong-Lem, Ngo. "Intercultural Communication in Second/Foreign Language Education over 67 Years: A Bibliometric Review." Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 54, no. 1--2 (2025): 1--21. https://doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2025.2456265.

   ABSTRACT: This bibliometric review analyzed 2,429 publications on intercultural communication in second/foreign language education from Scopus over 67 years. Findings highlight the growing integration of intercultural competence (IC) into curricula, with digital tools like telecollaboration and e-learning playing significant roles. Keywords such as "intercultural competence," "students," and "teaching" underscore IC's pivotal role in shaping pedagogical strategies. The USA and China lead research output, while emerging trends include gender dynamics and technology-mediated learning. These findings stress the need for professional development, culturally responsive materials, and IC-focused learning outcomes in language education.

3. Corey, Frederick C. "At the Nexus of Gumption and Intimacy." Text and Performance Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2025): 73--82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2024.2404239.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] As a student at Central Michigan University, I was bewitched by the oral interpretation of literature. During my first semester, I learned more about literature from Elbert R. Bowen than I had learned in all my years of education to that point. We studied texts by John Donne, Federico Garcia Lorca and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We read "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold alongside "The Dover Bitch" by Anthony Hecht. We learned about tropes, sound values and cadences and communicative corollaries of gesture, pitch and tempo, forever seeking "a contagious transference of appreciation from reader to listener" (Aggert and Bowen 5). It was the fall of 1975, when Northern Ireland was being torn apart by religion, Bangladesh was in chaos, Martina Navratilova left Czechoslovakia and sought political asylum in New York City during the US Open, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then joined them in a bank robbery, Gerald Ford saw a second assassination attempt, the Edmond Fitgerald succumbed to Lake Superior, the US and USSR were detonating nuclear bombs in anticipation of an all-out war, and I was discovering the joys of reading poems aloud.

4. Fox, Ragan. "Refining McGee's Ideograph: Celebrating 45 Years of Ideographic Criticism." Western Journal of Communication 89, no. 2 (2025): 278--97. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2024.2411515.

   ABSTRACT: This essay reviews various refinements of ideographic criticism. McGee first imagined ideographs as ultimate terms found in political discourse that serve as ideology's most basic units. Over the last forty-five years, rhetoricians have casuistically stretched ideographic criticism to better fit into postmodernism's grammars of cultural and textual fragmentation. In this article, I reflect on McGee's initial deductive framework, harmonize 1980 and 1998 McGee's divergent philosophies of ideology, and reference creative applications of ideographic criticism to support the method's four primary generative extensions, which include contemporary, personified, visual, and localized ideographs.

5. Hamera, Judith. "Text and Performance Quarterly: In and of the Humanities." Text and Performance Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2025): 113--18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2025.2453724.

   ABSTRACT: This letter of congratulations and welcome to Text and Performance Quarterly's incoming editor, Kimberlee Perez, argues for centering and advocating for the journal's epistemic commitment to the humanities within communication. It draws on archival materials, scholarship in the journal, and the author's experiences as both a faculty member and former TPQ editor to discuss the status of this commitment within the field. In a widely acknowledged moment of crisis for the humanities' position in US higher education, TPQ has a unique and vital role to play in expanding its profile within the National Communication Association and communication as a discipline.

6. Moreman, Shane T., and Bernadette Marie Calafell. "Reenvisioning the Need for Scholarship on and from Latinidad." Text and Performance Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2025): 25--37. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2024.2412722.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] Dear Shane, It was wonderful talking with you the other day. I have been reflecting on our conversation and also thinking about some of the prior work we have done together. It's been sixteen years since we edited the special issue of "Latina/o Performativities" in this journal. Can you believe it's been so long? While I'm interested in what has or has not changed in the field in terms of Latina/o/x/e Studies and Performance, I think it's also important to mark how we have changed as well. Back then we were younger, Assistant Professors, who were desperately looking for our voices or voices like ours in Performance Studies. We needed community. We needed a home. Lisa Flores, who has been such an important mentor to me, has written about the ways Chicana feminists rhetorically build homelands through their writing ("Crafting Discursive Space"). Building homelands also requires building bridges; and so much of what we had to do back in those days was bridge building. Furthermore, as Chicana/o/x/es we are used to being shapeshifters as we move through life (Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Calafell, Monstrosity; "Monstrous"). We have to be. Chicana poet Pat Mora (Borders) has written about this in terms of being bicultural. These are just some of the skills and contributions we bring as Chicanxs to Performance Studies.

7. Peña, Ernesto. "The Three Waves of Visual Literacy." Journal of Visual Literacy 44, no. 1 (2025): 1--17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1051144X.2025.2462379.

   ABSTRACT: Silos are an undeniable and unavoidable reality of knowledge production, particularly within academia. For those who choose to navigate between disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to within them, it is not uncommon to find similar concepts developing in parallel in two or more completely different fields of study. These silos tend to be not just disciplinary, but temporal, leading to the unintentional reinvention of concepts and the dismissal of already existing and potentially valuable scholarship. These silos can also be exacerbated by language or even personal agendas. In the face of this reality, it would be naive to assume a concept so seemingly intuitive as visual literacy would have escaped such silos. Although the documented history of visual literacy spans over eight decades and across several disciplines, a dominant narrative obscures portions of the whole history. By shedding light on the contributions of scholars and practitioners who have championed it from distant or occluded timelines, we get a fuller picture of the history of visual literacy and, potentially, a broader vantage point from where to explore it further. This article attempts to contextualise and reconcile the timelines (both the better-known and the more hidden) in a single chronology and to discuss the patterns that emerge from this exercise.

8. Russo, Giovanna. "Sociology and Cultural Industry Studies in Italy: Media, Consumption, Creativity." The American Sociologist, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-024-09637-z.

   ABSTRACT: The history and evolution of Sociology in Italy have a particular path which, from the second post-war period onwards, has as its objective the task of promoting the growth of the country's social culture, i.e. strengthening the connection between social science, scientific knowledge, culture, and daily life. Between difficulties and enthusiasm, the discipline faced significant changes towards modernization that also crossed Italy in the same period: the territory, the productive activities, the national life, the lifestyles of the Italians, and their consumption changed. Since the 1960s onwards, Sociology has taken its place in the country's daily life as a "cultural form of a wider culture" even though it did not represent a hegemonic discipline in the Italian panorama. In the same years, the development of the Italian cultural industry and the evolution of the culture market undergo a strong acceleration, assuming a central role in the social life of Italians and a guiding function in the elaboration of the collective imagination. In this context, the contribution intends to focus attention on the cultural studies that have developed at a national level following two main areas of development: 1) the emergence of the media and 2) the multiple nature of cultural products and material culture in the Italian scenario from the economic boom to nowadays.

9. Sanders, Sasha J. "My Pen-Pal, TPQ." Text and Performance Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2025): 10--24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2024.2412718.

   ABSTRACT: This essay is written as a collection of pen-pal letters addressed to Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) over the span of eleven years to document how our personal relationship informed my identity formation as a performance studies scholar. The letters begin with my introduction to TPQ as an undergraduate student and end with my current role as a performance studies professor. Over the years I have come to TPQ for insight and inspiration, for refuge and resistance, for community and communion. As pen-pals, I was able to radically imagine a reciprocal relationship with open communication and room for mutual growth.

10. Simmons, Jake, and Travis Brisini. "The Performance Studies Pendulum." Text and Performance Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2025): 50--72. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2024.2399768.

    ABSTRACT: This essay argues that performance studies in communication (PSC) is approaching a point of "nowhereness." It examines the implications of the 1990s framing of performance studies as an "antidiscipline," particularly insofar as antidisciplinarity disrupts the concept of disciplinary methodologies such as aesthetic performance. It offers an exemplar case that demonstrates how one familiar, established, perhaps keystone performance studies theory/method/practice -- dialogic performance has all but disappeared in PSC research. Finally, it offers a corrective but ultimately invitational call to bolster the communities of practice in PSC, especially in terms of performance-methodological and aesthetic research.

11. Tristano Jr., Michael. "Unsettling Performance (Studies) in Communication." Text and Performance Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2025): 38--49. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2024.2415906.

    ABSTRACT: I turn to collage to document my experience of doing performance studies work in communication studies, broadly, and TPQ, specifically. I weave between performative writing, documents, personal narrative, and text to unsettle the place of performance. I emphasize (a) the enduring legacy of coloniality and white supremacy of performance studies and (b) how performance studies work has become unrecognizable to the discipline outside of those who engage with TPQ. I argue performance studies in communication has imagined itself in such a way that the work often becomes unrecognizable to others in communication and interdisciplinary performance studies. Time for something otherwise.

Thanks for reading! The History of Media Studies Newsletter, a 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.