bio

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Jeff Pooley is assistant professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College. His research centers on the history of communication studies, as the field’s emergence has intersected with the twentieth century rise of the other social sciences. He also writes about celebrity, the consumer culture and media policy.

Pooley’s dissertation (“An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld and the History of American Mass Communication Research,” May 2006 “with distinction”) traces the rise of a standard disciplinary memory for communication studies, a storyline which helped to legitimate the infant social scientific field in the 1950s and 1960s. Pooley’s ongoing work in the history of communication studies includes:

a study of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence (“Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field”, Annals 2006). The paper won the semi-annual Article Prize from the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences;

a treatment of Edward Shils’ wartime revision of his social thought (“Edward Shils’ Turn Against Karl Mannheim: The Central European Connection”, American Sociologist 2007);

a short essay on the late James W. Carey and the Chicago School of sociology (“Daniel Czitrom, James W. Carey, and the Chicago School”, CSMC 2007);

a re-assessment of Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (“Straight by Day, Swingers by Night: Re-reading Daniel Bell on Capitalism and its Culture”, Review of Communication 2007); and

a survey and assessment of the recent wave of revisionist history of communication research (“The New History of Mass Communication Research,” in David W. Park & Jefferson Pooley  (eds.), The History of Media & Communication Research: Contested Memories (Peter Lang, 2008)). Here is the volume’s introduction.

Pooley is chair of the Communication History Interest Group of the ICA, editor of ASA’s History of Sociology Section newsletter Timelines, and editor of an online, searchable bibliography of published work on the history of communication studies.

Pooley served as an Annenberg Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2009, and is working on a short book on the late James W. Carey.