History of Media Studies Newsletter September 2026

Welcome to the 62nd 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, November 18

Wednesday, November 18, 15:00-16:00 UTC (10am-11am EST)

Reading for discussion:

• A selection from the just-published Latin American Communication Theories: From Origins to Contemporary Approaches, edited by Carlos A. Scolari, Sandra Valdettaro, and Leonarda García-Jiménez. All three editors will join us for the conversation, as will Raúl Fuentes Navarro, the subject of the enlightening interview at the end of the volume. The session will feature simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish.

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. 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

2. Cheiron Book Prize Competition

• Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Socal Sciences awards the Cheiron Book Prize biennially for an outstanding monograph in the history of the social/behavioral/human sciences. Submissions will be judged on the basis of their scholarly character, depth of research, and the importance of their contribution to their field of study. The author of the winning book will receive $500 and be expected to discuss their work in a session solely devoted to the Book Prize at Cheiron’s next annual meeting, which will be held at the University of Ottawa June 17 through June 19, 2027.
• Deadline: 31 December 2026
• More details

3. Celebrating Hilde Himmelweit (in-person and online)

• “Celebrating Hilde Himmelweit: women, scholarship, and LSE’s intellectual history,“ hosted by the Department of Media and Communications, will honor the life and legacy of Hilde Himmelweit (1918–1989), a pioneering refugee scholar and one of the very few women to hold a professorship at the School in its early history. Appointed Professor of Social Psychology in 1964, she played a pivotal role in establishing Social Psychology as a recognised field at LSE and made internationally influential contributions to media and communication research. Her landmark study Television and the Child (1958), the first major empirical investigation of television’s effects in the UK, helped shape debates about media and society for decades to come.
• Conference dates: 22 October 2026
• More details

4. CFP: Development Knowledge and Policies from the Global South, 1930–2000

• In recent years, scholarship on the history of developmentalism has included the Global South by exploring anti-developmentalist thought and resistance to development policies. At the same time, historiography started to acknowledge the participation of Global South actors in the making of Cold War development projects. Our conference aims to systematize these approaches and to resituate the Global South within the history of twentieth century developmentalism. To this end, we want to explore development knowledge and policies which were produced by actors from the Global South. The workshop is open to a variety of fields of development thought and intervention such as urban planning, infrastructure development, economics, business administration, agriculture, family planning, public health, and social planning. We particularly welcome contributions that address the listed questions and fields of development from a history of knowledge perspective.
• Conference dates: 19-20 July 2027
• Deadline: 18 October 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 October 30, 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. Bajouk, Hussein, and Carme Ferré-Pavia. "The four horsemen of the apocalypse: Research amid poverty, disease, war, and death." Health Communication 41, no. 11 (2026): 2072--2074. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2025.2608902.

   ABSTRACT: This essay presents a personal reflection on health communication research conducted in Lebanon amid poverty, disease, war, and the constant shadow of death. Through scenes of displacement, fear, and loss, it shows how crisis carves itself into the body and the work. This is a record of knowledge made under fire, and an invitation to confront what scholarship demands when the ground itself is not stable.

2. Capizzo, Luke, Elizabeth Toth, Jordan Morehouse, et al. "Articulating a center: An analysis of the strategic management paradigm in public relations." Journal of Public Relations Research 38, no. 5 (2026): 271--298. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2026.2629389.

   ABSTRACT: This research utilizes computational and network analysis methods to examine strategic management scholarship in public relations from 2012 to 2022, revealing how research within this paradigm has evolved with an increased focus over the past decade on non-traditional organizational contexts as well as internal communication and organizational listening. Although criticism of the strategic management paradigm has sought to expose its limitations, this research found a robust, inclusive, and expanding body of knowledge regarding strategic public relations management and a greater understanding of the evolving middle-range theories that constitute its perspective. This research reinforces the centrality and importance of the strategic management paradigm to broader public relations scholarship, and presents an expanded conception of its influence across traditionally disparate epistemologies of public relations research.

3. Kurambayev, Bahtiyar, and Mohamed M Mostafa. "Five decades of journalism ethics research: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis." Journalism 27, no. 9 (2026): 2750--2769. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849251384497.

   ABSTRACT: This study examines journalism ethics research over the past five decades. To this effect, a bibliometric analysis was conducted on around 2000 published peer-reviewed articles between 1973 and 2024. The articles were retrieved from Scopus database and were authored by 3229 scholars. The findings suggest that there is an exponential growth of scholarly articles in journalism ethics research, especially during the last decade. The study also identifies trending themes, topics that may be losing their relevance, top authors, top institutions and top countries, most cited research articles as well as co-occurrence networks along with thematic evolution of journalism ethics research. The study also uses reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) to detect the ‘historical roots’ of journalism ethics. Findings suggest that rapid growth in journalism ethics research has been noticed since 2013. Findings also suggest that misinformation, fact-checking, artificial intelligence, fake news are hot topics in journalism ethics while regulations, press council themes are losing relevance. This study contributes to growing research that focuses on identifying trends and key concepts in journalism.

4. Lent, John A. "In memoriam." Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 10, no. 2 (2026): 295--300. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/article/1001158.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] JOHN A. LENT, PHD, A LEADING SCHOLAR in comics studies, died on May 16, 2026. Lent will be remembered for his tremendous impact on comics scholarship, including writing and editing over ninety books, teaching from 1960 to 2011 at universities in Canada, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the United States, and founding and editing the International Journal of Comic Art for twenty-seven years, to name only a few accomplishments in an incredibly long list of professional achievements. Inks includes the following tributes, which will join many others in various venues, in recognition of his long career and legacy as a scholar and mentor.

5. Lowenstein, Adam. "How George A. Romero inspired the Horror Studies Center." Film Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2026): 57--62. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2026.80.1.57.

   ABSTRACT: This article recounts the genesis of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Relationships with the independent horror filmmaker Romero, the non-profit foundation and archival collection created in his name, and the city of Pittsburgh that Romero called home for most of his career are all explored. Romero’s landmark feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) plays an important role in Lowenstein’s personal as well as professional life: he screens it at his bar mitzvah party, and he relies on its lessons to give him hope in the wake of the anti-Semitic killings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Lowenstein’s experience hosting a screening of Romero’s Bruiser (2000) in Pittsburgh with the director in attendance is juxtaposed with a screening of Queens of the Dead (2025) in Pittsburgh with its own director: Tina Romero, George’s daughter.

6. Shanks, Brandon. "An analysis of listening theory in a community of practice of international listening scholars, 1987 – 2025." International Journal of Listening 40, no. 3 (2026): 133--148. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2026.2714473.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] The study of human interactions involves understanding phenomena such as speaking and listening. Theory, as defined by Bodie (Citation2009) is, “a systematic accounting of interrelated phenomena and why their relationships exist” (p. 83). At its core, theory is utilized as a tool for adding to academic discourse, emergent knowledge production, and shared scholarly conversation. Yet, Bodie et al. (Citation2008) assert that no single theory or definition of listening should be sought after by listening scholars and practitioners because holding space for multiple theories and definitions can be generative to the growth of the field of listening as a whole. Thus, in this project’s exploration of listening theory, I adhere to two perspectives. First, theories are a crucial part of developing conversations, definitions, and understandings of listening. Second, one should not argue for a singular direction or category that all theory should adhere to but rather encourage further conversation and theorization in all areas, attuning to the ways that previously established theories relate to novel and innovative theoretical ideas.