Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo: Jeff Miller ©UW-Madison University Communications

Post by Michael Curtin, University of California Santa Barbara

This is the eighth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Jonathan Gray’s post about mentorship and collegiality eloquently captures the collective sentiment of this online festschrift in honor of Michele Hilmes. Having worked closely with her as a faculty colleague, I can vouch for Jonathan’s account of her sterling leadership and professionalism. I want to comment briefly on the latter before offering some observations about Michele’s intellectual contributions to our field.

University professors can be pretty self-absorbed and, in a way, they have to be in order to run the gauntlet of tenure review and endure the stark loneliness of academic authorship. You have to believe deeply in yourself and your intellectual vision in order to simply persist as a scholarly researcher. The danger is that one can spend a bit too much time alone and attach a bit too much significance to one’s own vision. In the collective life of a department this becomes most evident when faculty members and graduate students begin to personalize the differences that inevitably arise in the course of departmental affairs. What’s truly remarkable about Michele is that she knows how to get the work done without personalizing the differences. Instead, she’s focused, clear-headed, articulate, and even-handed. Consequently, she can pull folks together and get things done under even the most challenging circumstances. Moreover, she does it in a confident but unassuming way that simply exudes professionalism. So, “best colleague ever?” Yes, without a doubt, and I might add, a role model for the profession.

Equally inspiring is the fact that Michele’s investment in the general welfare of the department hasn’t detracted from her scholarly accomplishments. She has, for example, published truly pathbreaking historical monographs over the course of her career. Hollywood and Broadcasting was one of the first media histories to direct our attention to the synergies between radio and cinema during the 1930s. Previous research had generally considered these media separately (indeed entire departments and programs were built around the differences), overlooking the important interconnections that shaped the evolution of American popular culture. Moreover, the book anticipated the groundswell of interest that arose regarding media “synergies” during the conglomeration wave of the 1990s. Hollywood and Broadcasting became a touchstone for many conversations on this important topic.

Michele’s second book, Radio Voices, was the first critical and cultural history of radio broadcasting in America, comprehensively addressing issues that had previously been under-appreciated, such as class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and national identity. She extended this scholarship into the television and new media eras with her landmark textbook, Only Connect, which is without a doubt the best cultural history of US electronic media that is currently available for classroom use. During my days as a graduate student, Erik Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty was the standard point of reference for media historians and instructors, a status it enjoyed for decades because it was both comprehensive and comprehensible. As any book publisher will tell you, there’s something to be said for understated eloquence. Barnouw and Hilmes: that’s pretty heady company.

Michele’s most recent monograph, Network Nations, was the first history to carefully compare the development of British and American radio broadcasting, exploring the many tensions and interconnections between the two. As is well known, the British public service and the American commercial systems became the two most influential templates for the development of electronic media around the world. Network Nations shows that although the two took decidedly separate paths, they were self-consciously constituted through their respective differences. That is, British media evolved partially in response to national conditions and partially in response to its imagined other, the commercial cacophony of the American airwaves. Likewise, the US networks strove to distinguish themselves from the elite and measured qualities of British radio while claiming to serve the desires of the listeners first. As Hilmes explains, the ongoing dialogue between executives, creative talent, and policy makers played a foundational role in the constitution of electronic media on both sides of the Atlantic and it resonated further afield, establishing the fundamental parameters of media polices  forged in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Europe. Network Nations has become an invaluable resource for research and teaching about media globalization.

So, think about it for a moment: three monographs (each a landmark), many anthologies, departmental leadership, superb teaching and mentorship, and as my festschrift collaborators have so eloquently affirmed, a profound influence on the development of radio and sound studies. Not bad. Days well spent… and many more to come. Congratulations and thank you, Michele.

This is the third post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Post by Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin-Madison

I sincerely hope (and expect!) that Michele Hilmes’ retirement will not be a retirement from academia, but since it will be a departure from the Department of Communication Arts, and from the Media and Cultural Studies area of the department, I’d like to comment on her as a colleague.

In doing so, I’d also like to insist that Michele has been the most important person in the cultural life of Media and Cultural Studies (MCS) at UW-Madison.

When I was hired in 2009, I was aware of this being seen as John Fiske’s program in the field at large (even though he’d retired in 2000). For all that he did, as inspirational figure, as translator of high theory, as champion of the popular, as ambassador of cultural studies to the U.S., and (by all accounts) as the guy who’d stay up past midnight discussing Gramsci with grad students in The Red Shed bar, he deserves plenty of kudos. But Michele’s own importance in building up the program and keeping it healthy was made clear when Fiske gave me advice (at the Fiske Matters conference) to follow in his foot-steps and never sit on any departmental committee other than the Graduate Committee. By contrast, Michele has been on almost every single committee in the department, from Graduate to Personnel and Tenure, Budget and Salaries to Awards, Development to Undergraduate, a Self-Study Committee to multiple search committees. She’s been Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Chair, and Chair. At the university level, she’s chaired the Humanities Division Executive Committee, performed program reviews, been a Women’s Faculty Mentor, chaired the college’s Equity and Diversity Action Committee, and been on the Ethnic Studies Implementation Committee. All of this while performing immense service to the field at large, while sitting on countless dissertation committees, and while publishing at a remarkable rate. She’s always found time, made time, to keep the machine running, to fix it, to reinvent it, and to ensure everyone knows how to work it.

MCS hasn’t just produced an impressive slate of alumni: many of them talk glowingly of their time here. Upon arrival, I was entranced by the energy, the camaraderie, and the commitment to asking all sorts of questions, but being collegial while doing so. I’m convinced that much of this has existed because of Michele. She wasn’t the only one, of course, but she has regularly been the one behind the scenes – serving on yet another handful or five departmental committees – who has upheld it, whose leadership, example, and careful politics have allowed it to continue, to thrive. She hasn’t gotten adequate credit for this, either, precisely because of how well she does it: countless times I’ve seen her walk us away from the edge, and move us in a better, safer, kinder direction, but I’m often the only one who has seen that. She doesn’t crow about her achievements, she doesn’t boast of great victories. She has an amazing ability to care deeply, to think through exactly what the best course of action is, to enact it, and then to brush it off, spare us the need to rehash it, and leave the office as though nothing ever happened.

She’s also regularly had to exert this leadership with few comrades-in-arms, or with an ever-changing list of colleagues. Through much of her time at Wisconsin, MCS has been short-staffed, meaning that Michele has regularly needed to walk into department meetings with nothing approaching a majority of the votes naturally on her side; she’s needed to work with others to get things done, to constantly communicate MCS’ needs and to articulate them to others’ needs so that they’re met. She’s had assistance, but each new arrival has been another person she needed to bring on-line. I’m often aware that when she calmly and expertly explains how something works to me, this must be the tenth time she’s delivered such a talk in the last decade, yet she never seems exasperated.

Her other great skill as a colleague, though, and especially as a senior colleague, is that she balances perfectly being there to give advice, to instruct and educate when needed, and to explain what was done in the past and why it was done, with an eagerness to allow each new arrival to put their imprint on things. It would have been easy for Michele to draw lines in the sand, declare that “this is what MCS is, and this is what we do,” and simply require successive waves of junior faculty to fall in line, but instead during my whole time here I’ve seen her excited to help the rest of us work out what we want MCS to be, what we want the department to be.

I’m aware that this is a “gushy” post. It reads like something that perhaps I should just be saying privately to Michele. But I’m saying it publicly in part to pay testament to a remarkable leader who has made this “her” program in the best way possible, and whose credit hasn’t been duly recognized in the field at large. I’m also saying it publicly to insist that collegiality matters. We tend to think of academic ideas and approaches as founding programs (and to this end, Michele has also been a remarkable leader, as evidenced by the number of MCS alumni whose work is historicized with great care), but interpersonal approaches, a culture of kindness and respect, and a commitment to working behind the scenes to keep all the mundane cogs, wheels, and springs working – these are regularly forgotten about. Michele has been a good colleague par excellence.

As you’ll all soon have the chance to listen to, Andrew Bottomley, Jeremy Morris, and Christopher Cwynar recently put together a podcast in Michele’s honor. It includes the voices of approximately 50 scholars and former students worldwide, all of whom glow about her not just as a scholar, but as a colleague, an advisor, a mentor, a friend. Discussions of great programs often privilege masculinized notions of having public academic “fights” and “battles” with “rival” camps, of steely eyed dictatorship and an unwillingness to negotiate, and of loud and proud proclamations of one’s identity from the hilltops. The impact of Michele’s example of another, better way is made clear throughout that podcast.

I have had the distinct privilege in my career to date of working with many truly amazing people. I hope none take offense when I say that even amongst them, Michele Hilmes rises above as the best colleague I could imagine. I’ll miss you dearly, my friend.