Radio Experts and State Authority in the Era of the Second World War

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.