Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, The Catholic University of America
Nominee: Michelle Hilmes
Josh Shepperd is assistant professor of media and communication at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. His research focuses on the genealogical development of media advocacy strategies, and their relation to educational and communications regulation. He’s especially interested in the logistical steps of how institutions and discursive groups organize from the bottom up to influence communications policy, media industries, curricular practices, and cultural perspective.
He is currently writing a book on how the media education reform movement built the early scaffolding for public broadcasting in the U.S. between 1934 and 1952. Advocates innovated standardized forms of noncommercial research, production, distribution, and aesthetic development in the service of a decentralized, horizontalized organizational structure.
Josh also serves as the director of the Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress, a digital humanities consortium spanning roughly 120 universities, museums, and federal institutions. The RPTF is working with multiple federal institutions, including the Smithsonian and NPR, to increase visibility of underrepresented histories by connecting sound preservation to classroom implementation through a metadata interface.
