Piers Britton on Mad Men's visual style, series structure, and Sixties-philiac tendencies, and how the TV series turned its tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness and a preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures into a branding strategy.
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Style, Structuring Conceits, and the Paratexts of Mad Men
Public-Service Streaming: BBC Three and the Politics of Online Engagement
Elizabeth Evans tracks the ongoing fallout of the BBC’s plan to relocate a channel to the online-only realm.
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David Letterman: So Long to Our TV Pal
Bradley Schauer argues that David Letterman’s brilliant late night talk show career would have been a nonstarter in today’s television landscape.
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Honoring Hilmes: “An Advisor is Forever” – Passing It On
Norma Coates reflects on what she learned about academic advising and mentoring from her own PhD advisor, Michele Hilmes.
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Honoring Hilmes: “New Media” Historian
Michele Hilmes’ legacy for radio and sound studies, broadcasting history, and cultural studies is clearly profound and prodigious, but her influence extends further, as well: this quintessential cultural historian is also a profound new media scholar.
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Black Widow and Whedon Exceptionalism: Accounting for Sexism in Age of Ultron and the MCU
Piers Britton explores questions of representation and issues of authorship and creative control in "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Honoring Hilmes: Strange Report
Through a case study of the British ITV series "Strange Report" (1969-70), Jonathan Bignell exhibits how Michele Hilmes' example has taught him that when we look closely at the detail of history, there are always more complex and more interesting things to discover.
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Honoring Hilmes: Days Well Spent
Michael Curtin contributes the eighth post in our "Honoring Hilmes" series, saluting Michele Hilmes on her sterling leadership and professionalism as well as her pioneering intellectual contributions to the media studies field.
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Honoring Hilmes: The Amplification of Women’s Voices
In this seventh post in our "Honoring Hilmes" series, Jennifer Hyland Wang contends that Michele Hilmes' greatest contribution to media history is her feminism, including her focus on the many women who operated in and around broadcasting as well as her mentorship of female graduate students.
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Michele Hilmes and the Historiography of Discursive Analysis (Part 1)
Josh Shepperd provides Part 1 of 2 to his final entry in the "On (the) Wisconsin Discourses" series with an examination of Michele Hilmes' contributions to discursive analysis.
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Honoring Hilmes: Radioed Voices Podcast
Listen to "Radioed Voices," a radio documentary/podcast paying tribute to media studies scholar and cultural historian Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement.
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Honoring Hilmes: Across the Borders
Continuing our "Honoring Hilmes" series, Jason Jacobs describes his use of Michele Hilmes’ work in his career, demonstrating her unique capacity to work across national borders both in her thinking and interpersonally.
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian, British Local Censorship, and the “Pythonesque”
Kate Egan uses the BBFC archive to consider British local censorship history through a case study of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
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Honoring Hilmes: Best. Colleague. Ever.
An ode to collegiality.
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Honoring Hilmes: Curious Mentoring
In the second post in our "Honoring Hilmes" series, Ben Aslinger praises Michele Hilmes for her intellectual curiosity and willingness to mentor a diverse array of students and projects.
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A Voice Made for Radio Studies: Michele Hilmes and the Building of a Discipline
In the first post in our "Honoring Hilmes" series, Bill Kirkpatrick argues that the quality of Michele Hilmes’ scholarship is undisputed, yet the example of her great work alone is not why Radio Studies is now thriving. It is also because Hilmes has done the (arguably much harder) work of field-building.
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