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Coming Up On Interchange: Welles Before Glass

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Our March 7 episode will be special 90-minute Interchange focusing on Orson Welles in his less-appreciated role as an innovator in the WWII-era radio feature, a genre of radio mixing fact and drama that is a (largely forgotten and unacknowledged) forerunner of the radio documentary, as we know it now. (Think Ira Glass and This American Life.) Michele Hilmes joins us to discuss what the radio feature was, why it arose, and what its role was in WWII, and how it relates to Welles’ signature style and concerns. We’ll feature selections from Welles’ Hello Americans and Ceiling Unlimited, programs which were official, government-sponsored propaganda.

GUEST:
Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on media history and historiography, particularly in the areas of transnational media and sound studies. She is the author or editor of several books in this field, including Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (1997), Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011), and Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, co-edited with Jason Loviglio (2013). She was a 2013-14 Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Nottingham, England and is currently researching the history of British/American television co-production.

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