Josie Barth

Josie Torres Barth, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, is a scholar of media history specializing in television and radio of the postwar US. Dr. Barth's research and teaching are driven by two questions: what is the historical experience of new media technologies, and how do they change our relationship to the space of the home, the outside world, and to the people around us? Her current book project, Uncanny on Air: Horror Anthologies from Radio to TV in the Postwar Home, traces the horror anthology format on radio and television through key moments of technological and industrial transition from the 1940s to the 1960s. As these programs exploited and foregrounded their new media technologies' ability to unsettle existing boundaries, postwar anxieties about technological and cultural change would become the thematic fodder for horror. Dr. Barth's courses explore similar themes of gender, technology, and social change across media history. Before attending graduate school, she worked as a freelance art director for film and television in New York.

Educational background

• Ph.D., McGill University
• M.A., Georgetown University
• B.A., New York University

Specializations

TV studies; radio and sound studies; history of US popular media; gender; genre studies

Selected publications

“Specters of Serling: Authorship, Television History, and Inherited Prestige in The Twilight Zone (2019-2020).” In Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First Century America, Eds. Seth Friedman and Amanda Keeler, Rutgers University Press, 2022, pp. 189-206.

“Sitting Closer to the Screen: Early Televisual Address, the Unsettling of the Domestic Sphere, and Close Reading Historical TV,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies vol. 34, no. 3, 2019, pp. 31–61.