Hi! You’ve reached the website of Andrew J. Bottomley.
I am an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication & Media at SUNY Oneonta (The State University of New York at Oneonta). There, I teach on a range of media formats and subjects: radio and podcasting, television, film, journalism, the internet and digital media. I approach these topics using a critical media studies methodology that incorporates historical, cultural, industrial, and comparative perspectives.
My research focuses primarily on sound media, specifically podcasting, radio, and related soundwork. I am first and foremost a media historian, and the majority of my research situates these contemporary topics like podcasting within the cultural history of broadcasting and web and internet histories. I also have research interests that expand into various other subject areas including the cultural industries, software and platform studies, popular music studies, television narrative, material culture, and aesthetic experience.
Book cover art by Daniel Murphy
My most recent project is The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting, which I had the pleasure of co-editing with my mentor Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The book brings together 40 contributors from around the globe, including scholars from a range of disciplines — radio/podcast studies, sound studies, cultural history, communication studies — along with podcast producers and radio art practitioners. And topics span from early radio history up through the present day, albeit all with attention paid to the centrality of soundwork and sound media's adaptability across cultures and time. There is also a collection of online materials and audio "quotations" that accompany many of the book's chapters, which can be accessed online via a dedicated companion website.
The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting was published by Oxford University Press in July 2024.
Sound Streams: A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence is my first book: a study of the emergence of podcasting and other forms of internet radio and streaming audio in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s, it historicizes the convergence of the “old” media of radio with the “new” media of the internet. In addition to developing a theory of radio for the internet era, I use extensive archival research, textual and ideological analysis, and ethnographic methods to map how radio on the internet opened up the medium to new producers and new audiences, as well as enabled more creative and more socially progressive forms of audio storytelling. It is the first book-length study of podcasting’s history and culture, as well as the first in-depth study of the role of audio in the history of computing.
Sound Streams was published by University of Michigan Press in June 2020. Check it out!
