What's New?: Media Archaeology & Historiography

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What does it mean to write the history of an emergent medium? Is radio a disembodied vaudeville stage show, and television simply radio with pictures? Is cinema an automated magic lantern show, a spectacular attraction, an animated novel... or something else entirely? What is a video game? What precedents and antecedents shaped these and other media, and what industries created them? And how do we write the histories of the vast audiences who mapped their own identities, anxieties, and desires onto them? This seminar begins by placing visual media historiography in a framework shaped by the critical history of technology, microhistory, and the development of social and cultural historiography. We will then explore a range of case studies that each foreground distinct theoretical and methodological challenges. We will address such issues as the productive tension between medium specificity and transmediation, histories of speculative or orphan media forms, the challenge of researching historical audiences and publics, everyday media practices and material culture, and the mediation of gender, race, and nationhood.