I am a historian in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

My research centers on the problem of media and identity, with a particular emphasis on the role of sound media and aural culture. My first book, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 analyzed the cultural politics of what I call “musical progressivism” — efforts by activists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chicago to reinvent music as an instrument of urban social change. Against the backdrop of urbanization, I explored the roots of new attitudes about music's "place" in public life, and the impact of bold experiments in promoting municipal public park concerts, community music schools, dance hall reforms, and local radio broadcasting on the cultural life of the city. Amidst the frequent clashes between bourgeois reformers, municipal officials, musical artists, and Chicago's immigrant, ethnic, and working-class urban dwellers, I found rich evidence of the historically contingent importance of music as a medium of acculturation, assimilation, and democratic change. We see the legacy of musical progressivism around us today. The will to communicate via music, to politicize its forms and publics, and the will to reshape social and political life via music emanates from the bottom-up, top-down, and middle out, and continues to shape the vibrant democratic possibilities of public culture in the U.S. and throughout the world.

My current book project, Radio Monde: Nationalism and the Cultural Politics of French and U.S. Broadcasting reflects an inter- and transnational turn in my research and thinking about media and identity. This forthcoming book looks at radio as a transatlantic technological, social, and cultural medium linking France and the U.S. in the twentieth century. It extends my interest in exploring the power of sound and music in shaping human experience, memory, affiliation, and agency.

Working for twenty-five years in academe and in public broadcasting reflects my deep concern with the anti-democratic tendencies resident in sectors of the world's modern media systems. I invite correspondence and dialogue with others who share my desire to promote the rebalancing of power between individuals and that of commercial and state media industries.