About

Current positions:

• Endowed (full) Professor (bijzondere hoogleraar) of Transnational Media,  connected to the Netherlands Institute in Sound and Vision, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

JPI-CH project “Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage”

NWA Route Kunst small project “Artists’ Community Knowledge (ACKnowledge)“, sub-project “Crafted: Passing on crafts and artistic expression to future generations of artists”

• Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent), Utrecht University, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

Currently working for the Clariah Media Suite to enhance internationalisation and broadcasting history

Research project (2013-2016): Transnational Radio Encounters (TRE) IP 4 International Services Between Expats, Empire and Education

• Board member and former president, Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte

Education:

• PhD Modern Languages, University of Southampton, UK 2004
• MA Social Science, University of Chicago, USA 1995
• BA German Letters and Anthropology, University of the South (Sewanee), USA 1993

Me:

I am both physically and intellectually a nomad.  I have studied and worked in five countries, and in disciplinary departments ranging from German language and literature to the history of technology. My research generally falls into three strands:

• Broadcasting and (trans)national identities. As the leading media of the 20th century, radio and television have simultaneously consolidated ideas of national belonging and provided access to imagined global spheres.   Believing strongly in the aims of a non-media-centred media studies, my approach to radio and television sees them less as objects of study in themselves than as privileged pathways into broader social questions and intermedial entanglements.  Together with Kristin Skoog of Bournemouth Univesity, I am currently researching the entanglements of women’s radio work with transnational women’s movements and networks in the 20th Century.
• Digital heritage and networked constructions of the past  Beginning with my work editing an online virtual exhibit that brought together the collections of science and technology museums in Europe, and continuing strongly as I work together with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the most recent strand of my research focuses on the problems and possibilities of networking heritage in the age of aggregation and convergence.
• Infrastructures, territories and transnational mobility.   Growing out of a large project on Transnational Infrastructures and Europe at the TU Eindhoven, and  my work in in Paris for the LABEX EHNE, this strand of research focuses on the way the building of networks both envisages and enables forms of mobility in European spaces. What are the technologies, insitutions and discourses that allows things, people and ideas to circulate, and how are they mediated?  Most recently, I have become interested as well in alternative or counter-spaces, such as the offshore broadcasters in the North Sea, and the squatted spaces in Amsterdam and their key links to the rise of internet culture there.

Besides research, as noted above I am a longtime board member of the German association for broadcasting history, the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte, and am involved in a number of European research networks, including the Tensions of Europe network, the Entangled Media Histories (EMHIS) Network, and the Women’s Radio in Europe Network (WREN), which I co-ordinate with Kristin Skoog.

As a teacher, I have the great fortune to teach on the interdisciplinary humanities BA programme Taal- en Cultuurstudies and the Humanities Honours Programme in Utrecht, as well as the MA Comparative Arts and Media Studies at the VU Amsterdam.

Please check out my updated list of publications or my profile pages at the UU or the VU

A note on the cover photo: it is Isa Genzken’s splendid Weltempfänger, which I saw in her show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.