The cultures of early TV

British Academy Conferences bring together scholars from around the world to present, discuss and consolidate new research in the humanities and social sciences.

The Cultures of Early Television is a two-day conference intended to initiate a transnational dialogue about television in the years before World War Two. Marking the centenary of the first public presentation of what John Logie Baird called “true television”, which took place in London in early 1926, the event brings together speakers from Britain, continental Europe and North America to explore the cultural ideas and achievements of the first years of the medium. Central to the programme of presentations and discussions addressed to aspects of television in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, central Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as to the screenings of rare archival material, is the development of intermedial understandings of early television’s close entanglements with the radio, cinema, theatre, dance and visual arts of the first half of the twentieth century.

Conference convenors

• Professor John Wyver, University of Westminster

Speakers

• Professor William Boddy, Baruch College
• Professor Oliver Botar, University of Manitoba
• Dick Fiddy, British Film Institute
• Dr Goron Galili, Stockholm University
• André Lang, director, Histoire de la télévision website
• Professor Angelina Lucento, Duke University
• Dr Donald F McLean, University of Glasgow
• Professor Jamie Medhurst, Aberystwyth University
• Dr Kate Murphy, Bournemouth University
• Dr Lawrence Napper, King's College, London
• Professor Danielle Simon, Middlebury College
• Simon Vaughan, Alexandra Palace Television Society
• Dr Anne-Katrin Weber, University of Lausanne

Further information

Tickets will be available soon.

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Image credit: © Estate of Harry Rutherford