The Wireless World Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting

The Wireless World sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. It is a co-written book, the result of more than five years of collaboration. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the co-authors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion. They also demonstrate that by paying more attention to audiences, programmes, and soundscapes, historians of international broadcasting can make important contributions to wider debates in social and cultural history.

Exploring the idea of a 'wireless world', a globe connected, both in imagination and reality, by radio, The Wireless World sheds new light on the transnational connections created by international broadcasting. Bringing together all periods of international broadcasting within a single analytical frame, including the pioneering days of wireless, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the study reveals key continuities and transformations. It looks at how wireless was shaped by internationalist ideas about the use of broadcasting to promote world peace and understanding, at how empires used broadcasting to perpetuate colonialism, and at how anti-colonial movements harnessed radio as a weapon of decolonization.

Simon J. Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol,David Clayton, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of York,Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Senior Researcher, Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research at TU Dresden,Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Senior Lecturer in the History of International Relations, University of Amsterdam,Nelson Ribeiro, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon,Rebecca Scales, Associate Professor of History, Rochester Institute of Technology,Andrea Stanton, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Interim Director, Korbel Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver

Simon J. Potter is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on media history and imperial history, with books including News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (OUP, 2003); Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British world, 1922-1970 (OUP, 2012); and Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-39 (2020). He has also published a centenary history of the BBC, This the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain, 1922-2022 (OUP, 2022).

David Clayton is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. He has written on the economic history of the British Empire in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on Hong Kong. His work on radio broadcasting has been published in the Economic History Review and the European Review of Economic History, and he is currently writing on British colonial broadcasting from 1930 to 1960, focusing on the building of infrastructures and the uptake of radio receiving sets.

Friederike Kind-Kovács is Senior Researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research at TU Dresden and Lecturer at Regensburg University. She is the author of Budapest's Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War (2022) and Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (2014), which won the University of Southern California Book Prize in Cultural and Literary Studies for 2015. She has co-edited two volumes: From the Midwife's Bag to the Patient's File: Public Health in Eastern Europe (2017) and Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism (2013), and most recently a double special issue on Childhood in Times of Political Transformation (2021).

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer is senior lecturer in the History of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. He specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial history and has a special interest in colonial media networks. He is currently working on Dutch international radio broadcasting in the late colonial period and the era of decolonisation. Recent publications include 'Radio as a Tool of Empire. Intercontinental Broadcasting from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s', Itinerario (2016) and '“From Heart to Heart”: Colonial Radio and the Dutch Imagined Community in the 1920s' in G. Blok et al. (eds), Imagining Communities: Historical Reflections on the Process of Community Formation (2018).

Nelson Ribeiro is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon. His research focuses on media history, and particularly on international broadcasting from the interwar period until the end of the Cold War. He is currently Principal Investigator in the project 'Broadcasting to the Portuguese Empire: Nationalism, Colonialism, Identity', and Chair of the History Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. His most recent co-edited books are Media and the Dissemination of Fear: Pandemics, Wars and Political Intimidation (2022) and Digital Roots: Historicizing Media and Communication Concepts of the Digital Age (2021).

Rebecca P. Scales is Associate Professor of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France (2016), which examines how the airwaves became a new space for political engagement during the decades between the two world wars, transforming the act of listening into an important, if highly contested practice of citizenship. Her research on the cultural politics of broadcasting has appeared in French Historical Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Media History, and French Politics, Culture, and Society. With Alejandra Bronfman and Andrea Stanton, she is a co-director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Faculty entitled 'Radio and Decolonization: Bringing Sound into Twentieth-Century History'.

Andrea L. Stanton is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Interim Director of the Korbel Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. Her research focuses on interwar and mid-century Arabic-language radio broadcasting. She has published widely on the Palestine Broadcasting Service, as well as on the BBC's Arabic Service and on the Egyptian State Broadcasting Service. She has received grants from the American Academy of Religion, the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the US Institute of Peace.