David Hendy

David is a media historian interested very broadly in the role of sound, images, and communication in human cultures across time. He's especially interested in the role of modern 'mass' media - radio, the press, cinema, television, the internet - in shaping popular life and thought in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

He studied history at St Andrews and Oxford universities before joining the BBC in 1987 as a journalist and producer. At the BBC he worked on The World Tonight and Analysis on Radio 4. From 1993 to 2012, he taught at the University of Westminster in London.

David's first book was Radio in the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). His second, Life on Air: a History of Radio Four (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) won the Longmans-History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008. In 2013, he published Public Service Broadcasting (Palgrave) and Noise: a Human History of Sound and Listening (Profile), which was also made into a 30-part BBC Radio 4 series. He's contributed to academic journals on subjects such as broadcasting policy, sound, music radio, documentaries, bad language, and experimental modernism, and emotions history, and has published short essays in the Cambridge Literary Review, History Today, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post and the New Humanist.