Description:
In Dead Men's Propaganda, Terhi Rantanen investigates the shaping of early comparative communications research between the 1920s and 1950s.
Brief description: Terhi Rantanen (MSc; LicSc; DocSc; Docent, Helsinki University) is Professor in Global Media and Communications at LSE. She is the founder of two double MSc programmes, with the University of Southern California (USC), which she directed from 2000 to date, and with Fudan University, Shanghai, which she directed for its first three years. Since the beginning of her career she has been conducting research on globalisation and the media, and especially on news organisations but also on the history of knowledge production.
Review Quotes:
"Anyone teaching or studying media and communications around the world will find this fine, well researched book to be utterly absorbing. It shows how 'outsiders' from central and eastern Europe and also from small town America helped to create a new field of study. They were enormously clever, moved across intellectual boundaries, and wrote with elegance and insight. They were also mostly Cold War warriors who had little time for female researchers. This book thus shows the origins of international communications research to be both awe-inspiring and embarrassing." - James Curran, Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London