[ecrea] CFP: Engagements with Ancient Greece on British Radio and Television

Broadcasting Greece: Engagements with Ancient Greece on British Radio 
and Television



Call for Papers



Broadcasting Greece is the first multi-authored collection of essays on 
the topic of ancient Greece on radio and television in the almost full 
century from the birth of public service broadcasting in Britain. The 
editors of this volume, which is under consideration by Edinburgh 
University Press, invite proposals for essays to complement a number of 
commissioned pieces.


The book seeks to investigate hitherto uncharted territory in its 
discussions of howradio and television programmes have engaged with the 
literary, historical and archaeological remains of ancient Greece in a 
wide yet interconnected range of programming formats, including material 
broadcast for schools and university students, documentaries, television 
fiction and presentations of theatre works.


In addition to recent television offerings by scholar-presenters such as 
Bettany Hughes and Michael Scott, there is of course a rich range of 
programming within living memory, and much more still extant and 
un-investigated in audio/audiovisual archives. The volume will also 
bring into discussion programming from even earlier decades of 
broadcasting, written and presented by notable figures such as Louis 
MacNeice, Gilbert Murray and Mortimer Wheeler, in order to relate 
programmes within living memory to their historical production contexts. 
Attention will also be paid to the symbiotic relationship that radio and 
television programming have had with print media such as books, 
educational curricula, newspaper publicity and, increasingly in the last 
two decades, with internet platforms (and, inthis regard, see 
Archaeology at the BBC, a BBC Four Collection of archival footage: 
www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/collections/p018818x/archaeology-at-the-bbc).


An interdisciplinary group of scholars will examine and discuss how 
radio and television have thus been used to construct political, social 
and cultural narratives of Greece through distinctive aural and visual 
languages, and to what broadcasting purpose (e.g. information, education 
and entertainment). The volume will therefore serve to elucidate the 
impact that this cultural activity in the dominant, domestic forms of 
mass media has had on public engagement with and perceptions of ancient 
Greece in Britain over the decades under discussion.


Proposals are invited for essays which explore topics such as:

·       children’s and educational broadcasting (such as BBC and ITV 
Schools programmes and The Open University’s use of television for 
courses on ancient Greece);

·       documentaries and other information programmes on historical and 
archaeological topics (the BBC’s long-running Chronicle series, for 
example);

·       original radio and television drama (such as Louis MacNeice’s 
WWII feature programmes for radio);

·       works of fantasy and science fiction, from Xena to Doctor Who;

·       and the small corpus of theatre and studio productions of Greek 
drama.


Potential contributors may wish to consider how individual works, 
authors, genres, ideas or historical moments have been translated 
tothese mass media (poetic forms on radio, for example, or the 
television adaptation of Plato’s Symposium in Jonathan Miller’s 1965 BBC 
The Drinking Party), to examine the contribution to broadcasting of 
significant figures who used mass media to facilitate public engagement 
with ideas of and from ancient Greece (for example, Gilbert Murray via 
radio) or to investigate the evidence for how listeners and viewers 
engaged with these programmes in order to chart the ways in which 
broadcasting channels, often in tandem with other cultural activity, 
contributed to perceptions of ancient Greece in the public imagination.


Essay proposals of around 600 words, outlining the planned subject, 
scope, method and sources, should be sent with a brief biographical 
statement to the editors, Dr Amanda Wrigley 
((a.wrigley /at/ westminster.ac.uk)) and Dr Fiona Hobden 
((f.hobden /at/ liverpool.ac.uk)) by Friday 19 July 2013, with a view to first 
drafts of essays being submitted in spring 2014.




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Nico Carpentier
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
T: + 32 (0)2-629.24.45
F: + 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401
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International Association for Media and Communication Research
http://www.iamcr.org/
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web:http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail:(nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web:http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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