Nominated by: Josh Shepperd
Michele Hilmes is professor emeritus of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a prolific historian of mass media, who has written seminal works on the institutional, political, and social role radio has played in shaping public and popular culture. She is credited with introducing the historiographical method to reconstruct media phenomena when primary sources have been lost, and is among the founders of the emergent field of “Sound Studies.” Her book, Radio Voices, is the standard for conducting analysis of gendered, racialized, and classed media representations as cultural forms. Her textbook, Only Connect, is the most widely appropriated teaching resource for media history in the U.S.
