Alexander (Alec) Badenoch is Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural studies. He is also the Beeld en Geluid Endowed Professor of Transnational Media at the VU Amsterdam,where he is PI on the JPI-CH project "Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage" and was member of the NWA Route Kunst small project "Artists' Community Knowledge (ACKnowledge)". He has a BA from the University of the South (1993), an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago (1995) and a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of Southampton (2004). He was the leading researcher on the HERA-project “Transnational Radio Encounters (TRE)” 2013-2016, and member of the NWA VWData Project "Capturing Bias: Diversity-aware Computation for Accurate Big Media Data Analysis" led by Prof Lora Aroyo of the VU Amsterdam 2017-2018. He is author of Voices in Ruins: West German Radio across the 1945 Divide (winner, 2007-8 IAMHIST Prize), and was founding editor of the Inventing Europe Digital Museum (www.inventingeurope.eu). He sits on the steering committee of the Entangled Media Histories (EMHIS) network, was a co-founder of the Women’s Radio in Europe (WREN) and Transmitting and Receiving Europe (TRANS) research networks, and was a longtime board member (including Vice President and President) of the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte (German broadcasting History Society). His research covers a range of topics in 20th Century transnational history, as well as reflections on archives and heritage, draws on disciplines ranging from media and cultural studies, cultural geography, gender studies, and history of technology.
Badenoch's current research falls into two key strands:
- Entangled histories of broadcasting. What happens when we stop reading histories of radio and television as ‘media history’? Adopting an approach that is both transmedial and transnational, radio and television are approached less as objects of study in themselves than as privileged pathways into broader social questions and intermedial entanglements. Current research together with Kristin Skoog of Bournemouth university looks into the entanglements of radio broadcasting and international women's movements in the mid-20th Century. Recent examples include: Badenoch and Skoog.'Lessons from Lilian: Is transnational media history a feminist issue?' Feminist Media Histories 5(3) (2019) and Skoog and Badenoch ‘Mediating Women: the International Council of Women and the rise of (trans)national broadcasting’ Women's History Review (in press 2024).
- Digital heritage and networked constructions of the past How do (digital) archival structures shape out stories of the past? Building both on practival experiences with online archives and exhibitions, as well as theoretical engagements with archives and infrastructures, this strand of research focuses on the problems and possibilities of networking heritage in the age of aggregation and convergence. Of particular interest is the way that digitized archives reproduce or obscure transnational aspects of heritage collections. Recent examples include Special Issue, edited with Emily Clark and Marek Jancovic: 'Re-bordering the archive: European Transnational Archives and Transnational Enytanglements' VIEW vol 12 Issue 24 (2023) and 'Recalling Radio: An Archival View from Radio's Second Century' in K. McDonald, & H. Chignell (Eds.), Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio (2023).