Weissman School of Arts and Sciences

William Boddy

Email: William.Boddy@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: (646) 312- 3721
Location: VC 8238

William Boddy received his Honors BA from York University, Toronto, in political science and urban studies and his MA and Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University.  In addition to Baruch College, he has taught at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and St. Francis College. Professor Boddy is the author of  New Media and Popular Imagination:  Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004) and Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics  (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990; paperback 1992) as well as dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters in the fields of media history, cultural studies, and film studies.

Prof. Boddy teaches Video Communication and Production and Advanced Video  Communication and Production, American Television Programming, and Topics in Electronic Media in the undergraduate program; and Media Analysis in the graduate program. He also teaches in the Certificate Program in Film Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, leading courses in film aesthetics, film theory, avant-garde film and video, and new media.

His research interests include the social implications of contemporary digital media, film and media theory, and avant-garde and nonfiction filmmaking. He is an associate editor of Cinema Journal, and a member of the editorial advisory boards of  Screen, The Velvet Light Trap, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Recent Publications

“’Margin and Chaos’:  Electronic Media and the Anti-Urban Impulse” in Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet (Exeter:  University of Exeter Press, forthcoming 2006)

“Early Cinema and Radio Technology in Turn of the Century Popular Imagination,” in André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell and Pierre Véronneau, editors,  The Cinema: A New Technology for the Twentieth Century (Lausanne:  Payot Lausanne, 2004), pp. 285-94.

“Interactive Television and Advertising Form in Contemporary US Television,” in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, editors., Television after TV:  Essays on a Medium in Transition  (Duke University Press, 2004), pp 113-32.

“‘Touching Content’:  Virtual Advertising and Digital Television’s Recalcitrant Audience,” in John Fullerton, editor, Reception Studies in Film, Television and Digital Culture (Sydney:  John Libbey, 2004).

“Redefining the Home Screen: Technological Convergence as Trauma and Business Plan,” in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, editors, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2003), pp. 191-200.

“Old Media as New Media: Television,” in Dan Harries, editor, The New Media Book (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), pp. 242-53.

“Weather Porn and the Battle for Eyeballs:  Promoting Digital Television in the USA and UK,” in John Fullerton and Astrid Soderbergh-Widding, editors, Moving Images:  From Edison to the Webcam (Sydney:  John Libbey, 2000), pp. 133-47.

“The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor:  Promoting Postwar US Television,” in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1: 1 (1998):  153-66.

"The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor: Promoting Postwar US Television," in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1: 1 (1998): 153-66.

"Sixty Million Viewers Can’t Be Wrong: The Rise and Fall of the TV Western," in Ed Buscombe and Roberta Pearson, editors, Back in the Saddle: New Approaches to the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 116-37.

"Senator Dodd Goes to Hollywood: Investigating Video Violence," in Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, editors, The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Transition (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 161-83.

"The Scholar’s Stake in Television Preservation," transcript of invited testimony in public hearings organized by the Library of Congress , "The Current State of American Television and Video Preservation," in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 16: 3 (1996): 393-96.

"Approaching The Untouchables: Social Science and Moral Panics in Early Sixties Television," in  Cinema Journal, 35: 4 (Summer 1996): 70-87.

Related Areas of Study
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