"Hier Welle Erdball" - 100 years of Radio Play International

The international conference "'Hier Welle Erdball' - 100 Years of Radio Drama International" brings together media and literary scholars, authors and radio producers from five continents in order to close this cultural-historical gap on the one hand and to inspire an intercultural comparison on the other. The aim of this exchange is at least to outline a "global radio play map", possibly even a "global radio play history", which shows parallel and opposing developments and sheds light on similar tendencies due to political or societal circumstances and previously unconsidered mutual influences. Previously unused points of contact are certainly available:

• The prehistory of the radio play was a decidedly international affair in that a veritable contest of inventors was underway around the invention of its medium, the radio, some of which continues to have an impact to the present day.
• The question of when, where and by whom the first "real" radio play was broadcast has long been the subject of controversial debate in literature.
• The themes dealt with in radio plays are subject to the zeitgeist and "fashions", which sometimes show striking parallels even across national borders, but are sometimes just as strikingly contradictory.
• The same applies to the way radio plays are made, for example the use of background noises, the use of music and the number of speakers.
• These content-related and formal conditions are strongly dependent on the political and societal circumstances of the respective country, the state of technology, economic requirements, wars, democratisation processes and changes in political systems.
• Nationally known writers can represent connections between different radio drama cultures and a worthwhile approach to research.
• Individual radio plays can also achieve supra-regional popularity and relevance. Orson Welles' radio play milestone "The War of the Worlds" from 1938 has been remade numerous times over the decades in several countries around the world, adapted to regional and zeitgeist circumstances. Here, too, trend lines would have to be measured.

Numerous other questions would be of research interest: How did radio drama develop and what role does it play in regions where illiteracy is widespread? Or in countries where literary activity is traditionally strongly characterised by state censorship? Or in places where radio was imported by colonial rulers but is still broadcast in the local language?

At the end of the radio play century, there is once again a great commonality, possibly the greatest since the invention of the radio play: radio is losing importance worldwide to the same extent that the Internet is gaining importance.

What consequences does this have for the radio play, and what does its future look like? Will it die out as a literary genre, will it migrate from radio to the internet, from the professional to the amateur sector? Will it be replaced by the podcast? Can similarities be recognised here across countries, languages and cultures, or will new differences emerge?

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Due to their ephemeral nature radio dramas are rarely translated, rarely reviewed in feature articles, and only considered by scholars in the language area in which they were originally broadcast. The result is that a wide variety of parallel worlds of radio dramas exist - at times even without knowing about each other.

The international conference "'This is Channel Earth' -100 Years of Radio Drama International" brings together media and literary scholars, authors and radio producers from five continents, on the one hand to close this cultural-historical gap and on the other hand to inspire an intercultural comparison. The aim of this exchange is at least to outline a "global radio drama map", possibly even a "global radio drama history", which shows parallel and opposing developments and illuminates similar tendencies and mutual influences that have so far not been considered. Hitherto unused points of contact are definitely available:

• The prehistory of the radio drama was a decidedly international affair insofar as there was a veritable inventor's competition about the invention of its medium, the radio, which in part still has an impact today.
• The question of when, where and by whom the first "real" radio drama was broadcast has long been a controversial topic in the literature.
• The topics dealt with in radio dramas are subject to the zeitgeist and "fashions", which sometimes show striking parallels across national borders, but sometimes are just as strikingly opposite.
• The same applies to the make of radio dramas, for example the use of background noises, the use of music, the number of speakers.
• These content-related and formal conditions are strongly dependent on the political and social circumstances in the respective country, on the state of technology, on economic conditions, wars, democratisation processes, on the change of political systems.
• Internationally known writers can provide connections between different radio drama cultures and a worthwhile approach to research.
• Even individual radio dramas can achieve supra-regional popularity and relevance. Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama milestone "The War of the Worlds" has been remade numerous times over the decades in several countries around the world, adapted to regional and zeitgeist circumstances. Here, too, trend lines would have to be measured.

Numerous other questions would be of research interest: How did radio drama develop and what role does it play in regions where illiteracy is widespread? Or in countries where literary life is traditionally strongly influenced by state censorship? Or in places where radio was imported by colonisers and yet is broadcast in the local language?

At the end of the radio drama century, there is once again a great commonality, possibly the greatest since the invention of the radio drama: radio is losing importance worldwide to the same extent that the internet is gaining in importance.

What consequences does this have for radio drama, and what does its future look like? Will it die out as a literary genre, will it migrate from radio to the Internet, from the professional to the amateur sector? Will it be replaced by the podcast? Can we identify commonalities across countries, languages and cultures, or are new differences emerging?

Abstracts 100 Years of Radio Drama International (pdf) (opens in a new window). (This PDF is not accessible)

Saturday, September 24
10:15-10:30 - Welcome by Dr Dieter Lohr (Germany).
10:30-11:00 - Prof. Liz Gunner (UK / South Africa) on radio drama in South Africa.
11:00-11:30 - Vikram Phukan (India) on Indian radio drama.
11:30-12:00 - Prof. Tim Crook (UK) on the pioneer of science fiction in British broadcasting R.E. Jeffrey.
13:00-13:30 - Dr Dragoș Carasevici (Romania) on the reception of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's radio plays in Romania.
13:30-14:00 - Prof. Alejandra M. Bronfman (USA) introduces a recently digitised archive of Cuban-American radio dramas.
14:30-15:00 - María Mercedes Di Benedetto (Argentina) on radio drama in Argentina.
15:00-15:30 - Assoc. Prof. Jina Eleanor Kim (USA) on radio dramas and dramatology in early 20th century Korea.

Sunday, September 25
10:30-11:00 - Dr Virginia Madsen (Australia) on Australian radio drama.
11:00-11:30 - Dr Daniel Schümann (Germany) on radio adaptations of E.I. Zamyatin's "We" in Great Britain and Germany.
11:30-12:00 - Prof. Mihaela Gavrila (Italy) on the radio drama telling the story of Italy and the world. A long alliance between public service media and new digital spaces.
13:30-14:00 - Prof. Christiane Heibach (Germany) on the contemporary radio play and the digital: Cultural dimensions of media self-reflection.
14:30-15:00 - Asst. Prof. Kerim Yasar (USA) on Japanese radio drama in transcultural context.
15:00-15:30 - Asst. Prof. Neil Verma (USA) on sound effects: The revenge of "The Revenge".

María Mercedes Di Benedetto (Argentina)

María Mercedes Di Benedetto graduated from the Instituto Superior de Enseñanza Radiofónica (ISER) as a screenwriter for radio and television, was a teacher at colleges and universities in the fields of "comprehensive language", "production and direction of radio and television" and "screenwriting for radio and television". She specialised in investigating the history of radio drama in Argentina and has edited three books on the subject. She is the writer and radio fiction lecturer, she travels the country giving seminars and workshops on the subject. Her works have been broadcast by national and international radio stations.

She has received numerous awards for her plays and radio dramas and performed at various literary and media congresses and at international radio biennials. She is currently Secretary of the Professional Radio Council of ARGENTORES, the General Society of Authors of Argentina.

Alejandra Bronfman (USA)

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies at the University of Albany. She is the author of Measures of Equality (2004), Isles of Noise, (2016) and co-editor, with Andrew Grant Wood, of Media Sound and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean (2012). Her research interests include sound, race, environment, and the materiality of media.

Dragoş Carasevici (Romania)

Dragoș Carasevici is lecturer at the German Studies Department of the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iași, Romania, where he teaches literary translation and German literature. He is also the coordinator of InterDramText, a project that deals with theatre translation and with the training of university students who are interested in theatre translation. Dragoș holds a PhD, which was the result of a cotutelle between the University of Iași and the University of Geneva (Switzerland), his main research areas being the German language theatre in the second half of the 20th century (with a focus on Friedrich Dürrenmatt) and productive reception of literary texts in theatre, music and film. Dragoș is one of the contributors to the Friedrich Dürrenmatt Handbook (Metzler Publishing House, 2020) and he is also the editor of a volume consisting of the Romanian versions of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's best-known radio plays (Univers Publishing House). [Besides his academic career, Dragoș is long-time contributor to the only printed Romanian music magazine, Sunete]

Tim Crook (UK)

Professor Tim Crook pioneered British independent production in audio drama in the 1980s and 90s with UK co-productions with NPR in the USA, new writing festivals and competitions and secured many national and international awards and for his writing, direction, production and sound design. He originated audio drama teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London and taught the specialist sound storytelling course for 30 years. He has written influential books and chapters on radio drama history and practice. These include Radio Drama Theory &
Practice (1999), The Sound Handbook (2013), and the forthcoming Writing Audio Drama (2023)
all for Routledge and the recent Audio Drama Modernism: The Missing Link between Descriptive Phonograph Sketches and Microphone Plays on the Radio by Palgrave Macmillan (2020). He likes to investigate the past to create new insights which can inform the present art of audio drama on the radio and in online podcasting.

Mihaela Gavrila (Italy)

Mihaela Gavrila is Professor of Entertainment and Television Studies at Sapienza University of
Rome. In December 2017, she was appointed as a member of the Media and Minors
Committee at the Ministry of Economic Development. She is Director of the Master's Degree in Security, Interforce Coordination, International Cooperation at Sapienza University, in agreement with the Interagency Law Enforcement Academy of Advanced Studies. She
manages the activities of RadioSapienza University Radio Station. She researches and teaches Entertainment and Television Studies, Security Studies and Gender and Media Studies. She has published the co-edited volumes Vincere la paura. Una nuova comunicazione della sicurezza contro il mediaterrorismo with Mario Morcellini (Egea, 2021), Il Cinema dà Sapienza with Roberto Faenza (FrancoAngeli, 2020), Il futuro dello spazio pubblico. Nuove professioni per nuove esigenze sociali with Fiorenzo Parziale (Maggioli, 2018), Media che cambiano, parole che restano with Davide Borrelli (FrancoAngeli, 2013) and the monograph La crisi della TV. La TV della crisi. Televisione e Public Service nell'eterna transizione italiana (FrancoAngeli, 2010).

Christiane Heibach (Germany)

Christiane Heibach is Professor of Media Aesthetics at the Institute of Information and Media, Language and Culture at the University of Regensburg. Her research focuses on the epistemology of media, the history and theory of multi- and intermedia art forms, the aesthetics of new media and the literary and media theories of the twentieth century. She is the author of numerous studies in digital and multimedia aesthetics and has recently published The Construction of Media Authorship. Investigating Artistic Practices form Early Modernity to the Digital Age (co-edited with Angela Krewani and Irene Schütze, Berlin: de Gruyter 2021).

Jina Eleanor Kim (USA)

Jina Eleanor Kim is an associate professor of Korean literature and culture in the Department
of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan, a comparative study of modernist literature and culture emerging in Seoul and Taipei during the Japanese colonial era; co-editor of The Journal of Korean Studies special issue on "Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Culture, and Film," a collection of essays that show how the movements across media can open up new ways of engaging in transnational, interdisciplinary work on Korea. She is currently completing a second book project on Auditory Texts in Colonial Korea, which examines the relationship between emerging genres and new sound media technologies, especially through the study of radio and radio dramas.

Her recent publication on radio includes:

Korean Radio Drama: Mid-century Melodramatic Voice Performance is forthcoming in the
Oxford Handbook of Radio Studies.
The Sonic Unconscious and the Wartime Radio Novel in Colonial Korea, 275-291. in Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature. Ed. Yoon Sun Yang. London: Routledge, 2020. Broadcasting Solidarity Across the Pacific: Reimagining the Tongp'o. In Take Me Home and the Free Chol Soo Lee Movement. The Journal of Asian Studies 79.4 (November 2020): 891-910. Between Documentation and Dramatisation: Modes of Critique in South Korean Yushin-Era Radio Culture. positions: asia critique 27.2 (May 2019): 397-420.

Dieter Lohr (Germany)

Dieter Lohr is a research associate at the Institute for Media, Language and Culture at the University of Regensburg. One of his main research interests is the history of radio drama; his most recent publication in this field is an article on the radio plays of Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the Dürrenmatt Handbuch (Metzler 2020). In addition to his academic work, he is an author of fiction and has been running an audiobook publishing house since 2004, which was awarded the prize for a small Bavarian publishing house by the Bavarian State Minister for Science and the Arts in 2016. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his literary work, including the C.S. Lewis Prize of the Brendow Publishing House and the Cultural Promotion Prize of the City of Regensburg. The radio feature Der Fahrradspeichenfabrikkomplex (The Bicycle Spoke Factory Complex), published by him and Angela Kreuz, was nominated for the German Audiobook Award in 2010.

Vikram Phukan (India)

Vikram Phukan is a Mumbai-based theatre practitioner and stage commentator. his writings on theatre have appeared in publications like The Hindu, Forbes India, Mint Lounge, International Gallerie, Firstpost and News9. Guest faculty at Drama School Mumbai, he has served on curatorial and grant-making committees with the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre

Awards, the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, Thespo and the Serendipity Arts Festival. He has written and directed Those Left Behind Things, a play on asylum seekers, and the recent
Dry Ice, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts, both produced by his group, Theatre Jil Jil Ramāmani. His writing credits include Sunil Shanbag's Hindustani musical Stories in a Song; Limbo, a rites of passage drama; a collaboration with Patchworks Ensemble on drag revue The Gentlemen's Club; & the Indo-US venture Even Mists Have Silver Linings. He's the founder of Inqueerable, a platform for Indian queer theatre.

Neil Verma (USA)

Neil Verma is Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of more than 30 chapters and articles about the history of radio and other audio media. His books include Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics and American Radio Drama (2012) and, as co-editor, Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (2016) and Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (2020). He is the winner of the SCMS Best First Book Award and of the Kraszna-Krausz best Moving Image Book Award. He founded the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies, serves as the Conference Director of the Radio Preservation
Task Force at the Library of Congress, and edits the RadioDoc Review. Verma is also a sound artist who specialises in experimental field recording. His recordings have aired on Resonance FM, Radiophrenia, Wave Farm and other venues.

Kerim Yasar (USA)

Kerim Yasar is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California, where he specialises in modern Japanese literature and cinema, media history, and translation studies. His first book, Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945, examines the roles played by the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and sound film in the discursive, aesthetic, and ideological practices of Japan from 1868 to 1945. He is also active as a translator in a variety of genres and media, from contemporary novels to pre-modern poetry to the subtitles for more than a hundred feature films in the Criterion Collection/Janus Films library, including classic works by directors such as Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujirō, and Oshima Nagisa. He was previously Assistant Professor of Japanese at Ohio State and a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of
Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University.