Shawn Vancour

Shawn VanCour’s research explores the industrial, technological, and aesthetic histories of U.S. radio and television, their relationships with neighboring sound and screen media, and their transformations in the digital era. His first book, Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture, traces the development of dominant production practices and performance styles for early U.S. radio and their impact on adjacent fields of film and music recording. He is currently working on a second book on the professionalization of below-the-line production workers during U.S. television’s initial postwar expansion period. His scholarship has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Material Culture, Modernist Cultures, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, and various anthologies, as well as online forums such as Sounding Out!, Flow: A Critical Forum on Television & Media Culture, and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.