Hendy, David
Reader in Media and Communication
2009-2010 Marjorie G. Wynne Fellow in British Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, and Helm Fellow, Lilly Library, Indiana-Bloomington University, USA.
Email: d.hendy@westminster.ac.uk
Biography
David Hendy is a media historian with a broad interest in the social and cultural impact of broadcasting and cinema over the past two centuries. Before joining the University of Westminster in 1993 he studied history at St Andrews and Oxford and then worked as a senior producer in the BBC for six years on series such as The World Tonight and Analysis. He continues to be involved in broadcasting. In 2010 he’s writing and presenting a series of five programmes for The Essay on Radio 3 – called ‘Rewiring the Mind’ - and is the co-writer for a forthcoming Radio 3 dramatization of the life of the Victorian scientist Oliver Lodge.His books include Radio and the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) and Life on Air: a History of Radio Four (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which won the History Today-Longmans Book of the Year Award in 2008 and was nominated for the Orwell Prize. He’s also written about aspects of broadcasting and cultural history in a range of journals and magazines, including Cinema Journal, Media History, the Journal of Radio Studies, Media, Culture & Society, History Today, the BBC History magazine, Press Gazette, New Humanist, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and The International Encyclopedia of Communication, and has contributed to a number of radio programmes in Britain and overseas.
He’s currently working on two books. The first, Key Concerns in Media Studies: Public Service Broadcasting (Palgrave, 2011), offers a comparative approach to its subject, both historically and globally. His major research over the next few years, however, is focused around a second book, Media and the Making of the Modern Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). The book will explore four new media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – cinema, radio, television, and the internet - and their collective contribution to our creative and intellectual life over the past 120 years. It’s concerned with the way common perceptions of the world, and the kinds of knowledge we accumulate, have been influenced by our changing habits in listening-to and viewing these new media – in how they have collectively helped forge ‘modernity’.
David Hendy’s broader research interests include the aesthetics of documentaries, relationships between early radio and cinema and modernist trends in art and literature, comparisons between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, ‘neurohistory’, and public history. He’s a member of the European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies, the Radio Studies Network, the History and Policy network, the Media Ecology Association, and the Southern Broadcasting History Research Group. He’s also a founding signatory member of the Citizen’s Coalition for Public Service Broadcasting – launched in 2009 in order to maintain the idea of public service broadcasting as being essential for the health of civic society in the twenty-first century. Since 2003 he’s served on the international editorial board of The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media. In 2008-9 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) and Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. In 2002-3, he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow.
Teaching
Undergraduate modules include: ‘Media Transformations’, ‘Broadcasting & Society in the Twentieth Century’, ‘Sound, Music & The Media’, ‘Media Events’, ‘Story, Sound, Image, Text’.PhD Supervision
PhD supervision: David Hendy is interested in supervising in the broad field of media history. He currently supervises students working on: a history of women’s radio in Britain, 1945-55; community radio under New Labour; soundscapes and media in the Brazilian Favelas; the postwar record industry; the origins of BBC local radio.
