Derek W. Vaillant, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate in the Program in American Culture (Ph.D., History, University of Chicago). After studying literature in college, I pursued a career in public radio and public television in Washington, D.C. and New York City that included several projects with Bill Moyers at WNET/Thirteen, including The World of Ideas, as well as work on Heat with John Hockenberry, a Peabody Award-winning NPR radio series. In 1992 I moved to Chicago to pursue a Ph.D. in U.S. history at the University of Chicago. I had the good fortune to work with George Chauncey, Kathleen Conzen, and Phil Bohlman, among others. My first book, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003), analyzed the cultural politics of what I called “musical progressivism” — efforts by activists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chicago to enlist music in assimilation and Americanization projects geared toward immigrant, ethnic, and working-class urban dwellers—and the resistance and accommodation to, and negotiation of, such projects by Chicago residents themselves. I argued that musical progressivism shifted the politics of everyday music in the city, conceptions of civic life, and the nature of urban public space.

My current research interests include the social and cultural history of media and communications in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century to the present, the transnational culture and politics of broadcasting, sound studies, and the cultural history of American music, media, and technology. My forthcoming book, Radio Monde: Nationalism and the Cultural Politics of French and U.S. Broadcasting looks at radio as a transatlantic technological, social, and cultural medium linking France and the U.S. in the twentieth century.