© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away. [1] What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and...

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,

On June 1, 1963, J. P. Clark’s poem “Agbor Dancer” was recorded for the London-based Transcription Centre’s program Africa Abroad, an English-language radio magazine program distributed for broadcast on multiple African stations. [1] Africa Abroad producer Lewis Nkosi praised the poem and recorded it in its entirety in his review of the anthology Poems from Black Africa, edited by Langston Hughes. [2] In “Agbor Dancer,” the speaker watches a woman dance to drums and juxtaposes the dancer’s...

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Foreign-language broadcasting projects in the United Kingdom and the United States faced momentous challenges during World War II, a time when totalitarian regimes had successfully appropriated wireless technology for propaganda purposes. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would argue, countries such as Nazi Germany had turned radio into an agent of political repression by creating passively receptive audiences who uncritically absorbed fascist doctrines....

Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-twirling shortwave enthusiast, stationed in (perhaps) Cork, and tuning in to transmissions Irish in affiliation but emanating from Dublin, Addis Ababa, New York City, Belfast, Geneva, London, and Berlin—transmissions that dazzle by their variety and that impart an awareness of their connectedness in dispersal.