My academic research focuses on the intersection of twentieth-century culture and mass media. I’m particularly interested in the cultural function of radio and other broadcast technologies in the English-speaking world, and have published on writers and intellectuals from Ireland, Britain, and the Global South. Below are my book-length works; please feel free to reach out via the Contact page for more information on these or other research publications.
Dubliners (2024)
This readable and thoroughly annotated edition of James Joyce’s classic 1914 story collection about the lives of middle-class Dubliners was commissioned by W.W. Norton for their Norton Library series of affordable editions aimed at an undergraduate and general readership. Rather than drawing on one of the existing scholarly editions of this text, this edition was shaped afresh through a close attention to Joyce’s manuscripts and the proofs from the abandoned 1910 Maunsel edition of the book, which were read alongside the notoriously imperfect 1914 edition to yield a version of the text that represents Joyce’s considered textual and typographical preferences. Find it at your local bookseller, via the W.W. Norton website, or on Amazon.
You can also hear me talk about Joyce, Dubliners, and life in early-twentieth-century Dublin on the Norton Library podcast. Episodes are available wherever finer podcasts are found, including on YouTube (ep. 1, ep. 2) and on Spotify.
Writing the Radio War (2018)
Wartime British writers took to the airwaves to reshape the nation and the Empire
Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the middlebrow radicalism of J.B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalised on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire.
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (with Alex Goody, 2022)
In twenty-eight chapters by leading academics, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology re-examines the machines and media that functioned as modernism’s contexts and competitors. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by the theoretical and socio-historical frames of current teaching and research on modernism and technology, this research volume makes a crucial and timely intervention in the field of modernist studies. The scholarly contributions on machines that govern transport, production, and public utilities, on media and communication technologies, on the intersections of technology with the human body, and on the technological systems of the early twentieth century capture the contemporary state of modernist technology studies and chart the future directions of this vibrant area.
Hear a podcast interview with Alex Goody and me here, conducted by Michael McCluskey of the Space Between Society.
Radio Cultures of the Global South (2022)
The ten essays assembled in this special issue of the journal The Global South on “Radio Cultures of the Global South” (15.2, Spring 2022) offer a sweeping look at radio’s place across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from the Southern Cone nations of South America to Haiti, Nigeria and Palestine. This special issue was recently accepted for republication in book form by Indiana University Press (forthcoming 2024).
Ian Whittington 