Debra Rae Cohen

Bio

Debra Rae Cohen is Professor of English Emerita at the University of South Carolina. She is the co-editor of Broadcasting Modernism and Teaching Representations of the First World War, and author of Remapping the Home Front; her current project is entitled Sonic Citizenship: Intermedial Poetics and the BBC. As former co-edtor of Modernism/modernity, she helped create the Print Plus platform, for which she curates the modernism and activism blog In These Times.

Contributions

Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts by Michael Carney and Kate Murphy

Print Plus Exclusive

If literary radio studies, in its first couple of decades, anointed a hero, it was probably Hilda Matheson. The first Head of Talks at the BBC, not only an accomplished bureaucrat but a practical theorist who developed the style of “intimate address” by which the broadcaster artificially produced the impression of naturalness, Matheson was a perfect candidate for celebration: lover of Vita Sackville-West, booster of literary broadcasting, martyr (or so the story goes) to the patriarchy, as represented by Director-General Sir John Reith,

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