Dr Siân Nicholas
MA (Cantab), MA (Chapel Hill), DPhil (Oxon)
Contact
Email: shn@aber.ac.uk
Office: C51
Phone: 2668
Teaching Areas
Dr Sian Nicholas teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules in modern British history, covering in particular the two world wars and on the history of the mass media in Britain. She teaches the Part One option module HY13220 Britain and the First World War, the Part Two option module HY37730 Media and Society in 20th Century Britain, a year 2 skills module HY33420 History as Myth-Making: the ‘Myth of the Blitz’, and a Year 3 Special Subject, Britain at War 1934-45. She also contributes to the Part Two survey modules HY31620 War and Society in History and HY31220 Sport, Leisure and Popular Culture in Britain since 1850. Dr Nicholas also convenes the MA Media History and teaches the option modules HYM3230 Politics and War: the Political Culture of Britain 1939-45, HYM3130 Political Power and the Media in Modern Britain, and HYM8130 War and the Media on the MA Modern Britain and the MA Media History.
Dr Nicholas has supervised undergraduate and MA dissertations in a wide range of topics in modern British and American social, cultural and political history, and PhD students in the fields of British cinema and press history, and the history of the early environmental movement. She is happy to supervise PhD students on any aspect of British media history (especially broadcasting history) as well as a range of topics in British social and cultural history.
Research
Dr Sian Nicholas specialises in twentieth-century British political, social and cultural history with particular research interests in the history of the British mass media in the first half of the 20th century (in particular broadcasting), the British experience of the Second World War, and aspects of British national culture and identity. Her current research explores the relationship between broadcasting and the press in the early years of wireless in Britain, and she is also interested in aspects of Americanisation in British culture and society in the first half of the twentieth century.
Dr Nicholas was until recently an editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History, and is currently a member of its Advisory Board. She is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Media History.
Dr Nicholas is Co-Director (with Professor Tom O’Malley) of the Aberystwyth Centre for Media History. She is an Honorary Associate of the Macquarie University Centre for Media History. She is also an Advisory Board member of the AHRC Research Network on Early Broadcasting, and the AHRC Interdisciplinary Research Network on the Middlebrow in Inter-War Britain.
Biography
Dr Siân Nicholas MA (Cantab), MA (North Carolina), DPhil (Oxon) is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She specialises in 20thC British political, social and cultural history. Her research interests are in the British mass media, national culture and national identity in the first half of the twentieth century. She is the author of The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC (1996), and has contributed to a wide range of publications, includingNorthcliffe's Legacy (2000), eds Peter Catterall, Adrian Smith and Colin Seymour-Ure (on BBC-press rivalry in the inter-war years), Millions Like Us: British Culture in the Second World War, ed Jeff Hayes and Nick Hill (1999) (on the wartime BBC), and Heart and Soul: the Character of Welsh Rugby, ed, Huw Richards, Peter Stead and Gareth Williams (1998) (on outside-half Jonathan Davies). She is the author of the chapter 'Being British: Creeds and Cultures', in the forthcoming Oxford Shorter History of the British Isles: The Twentieth Century 1900-1950, ed Keith Robbins, and is currently completing a history of the mass media in twentieth century Britain for Palgrave (due out 2002/3). Among conferences addressed, she will be speaking on 'Brushing Up Your Empire: Dominions coverage on the wartime BBC home services' at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies conference on 'The British World' in Cape Town in January 2002. She has recently received an Arts and Humanities Research Board Research Leave awar.
Additional Interests
Papers given 2008-present:
2008
- '“There will be no war”: the Daily Express and the approach of war 1938-39', Conference on Justifying War, University of Kent at Canterbury, July 2008
2009
- '“There will be no war”: the Daily Express and the approach of war 1938/39'. St Andrew's University History Research Seminar, 25 February 2009
- 'Fifth columnists, collaborators and black marketeers: “enemies within” in the wartime British media', IAMHIST Conference on The Media, Social Fears and Moral Panics, Aberystwyth, July 2009
- 'The BBC and the people', Symposium on 'The day we went to war....', Broadcasting House, London, 1 Sept 2009
- 'Don't trust the messenger? The emergence and evolution of media brands in news and entertainment' (with Peter Miskell), ESCR Conference on 'A New Kind of Property – an Old Perspective on Trade Marks', University of York, November 2009
2010
- 'The BBC and its critics: the radio column in the British press in the 1930s', Symposium on Broadcasting in the 1930s, University of Wisconsin at Madison, July 2010
- 'The history of broadcasting and the history of the BBC', Symposium on Media Historiography, Kings College London, July 2010
- 'Towards an integrated history of the mass media: the radio page in the British press in the 1930s', Aberystwyth University History Research Seminar, October 2010
- Conferences organised (2005 to date)
- 'Media History and History in the Media', conference at Gregynog, 31 March–1 April 2005, co-organised by the Aberystwyth Centre for Media History, the Department of Media and Communications, University of Wales Swansea, and the journal Media History.
- 'Media History and History in the Media: the Media and Time', Second Gregynog Media History conference, Gregynog, 28-30 March 2007.
- 'The Media, Social Fears and Moral Panics', Third Gregynog Media History conference, in association with the XXIII biennial International Association of Media and History (IAMHIST) Conference, 8-11 July 2009.
- 'Broadcasting in the 1950s', organised by the AHRC Network on Early Broadcasting in association with the Aberystwyth Centre for Media History, to be held at Gregynog, 24-27 July 2011.
- 'Perception, Reception: the role of the mass media in society', Fourth Gregynog Media History conference, in association with the Trinity College Dublin Long Room Hub, to be held at Aberystwyth University, 4-6 July 2012
Recent conference/ research project/ network details:
The Aberystwyth Centre for Media History is currently involved in organising two conferences. It is co-hosting the 'Broadcasting in the 1950s' conference held as part of the AHRC Network on Early Broadcasting, to be held at Gregynog, 24-27 July 2011. It is also convening and hosting 'Perception, Reception: the role of the mass media in society', the Fourth Gregynog Media History conference, to be held in association with the Trinity College Dublin Long Room Hub, at Aberystwyth University, 4-6 July 2012.
Staff Publications
Selected publications (2007- present):
2007
- ‘Keeping the news British: Reuters, the British United Press and the BBC in the 1930s’, in Mark Hampton and Joel Wiener, eds, Anglo-American Media Interactions (Palgrave, 2007)
- American commentaries: news, current affairs and the limits of Anglo-American exchange in inter-war Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (4) 2007: pp. 461-479
- ‘The good servant: the origins and development of BBC Listener Research 1936-50’. Introduction to BBC Audience Research Reports Collection, Part I: BBC Listener Research Department 1937-1950 (Microform Academic Publishers, 2007)
- ‘History, revisionism and television drama: Foyle’s War and the ‘Myth of 1940’, in special issue of Media History, ‘Reconstructing the Past’, co-edited with Tom O’Malley and Kevin Williams, 13 (2/3) 2007: pp. 203-220
2008
- Co-editor, with Tom O'Malley and Kevin Williams, Reconstructing the Past: History in the Mass Media, 1890–2005 (Routledge, 2008) (published edition of Media History special issue, above)
2010
- Roundtable (with Su Holmes, James Curran, Tom O’Malley and Michael Bailey) on Michael Bailey ed, Narrating Media History, Media History, April 2010
2011
- '"There Will Be No War": the Daily Express and the outbreak of war in 1939', in Jo Fox and David Welch eds., Justifying War (2011)
- 'Policing Tonal Boundaries: Constructing the Nazi/German Enemy on the Wartime BBC' in Willibald Steinmetz ed., Political Languages in the Age of Extremes (OUP/ German Historical Institute, 2011)