Kate Lacey
Kate Lacey is Professor of Media History and Theory in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities and, since August 2019, Director of the AHRC DTP Consortium for the Humanities and Arts in South-East England (CHASE). CHASE is a doctoral training programme across 8 institutions: Birkbeck, the Courtauld Institute, the University of East Anglia, the University of Essex, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, and the University of Sussex.
She also convene the MA in Media and Cultural Studies at Sussex, and teach a range of modules on media history and theory across both the MA and BA programmes, as well as offering MA and PhD supervision (see Research profile).
Her teaching and research reflect her interests in the intersections between History, Politics and Communications. After a BA in European Studies (German and Politics) at Queen Mary College, University of London, I did a PhD in German History at the University of Liverpool under the supervision of Prof. Eve Rosenhaft. DAAD studentships allowed her to also study Germanistik at the Free University Berlin, and later to spend a year with the Frauenforschungscolloquium (Women's Research Colloquium) at the Technical University in Berlin.
Her first monograph was Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1996). It deals with the constitutive role of gender in the development of broadcasting, the role of the media in times of political transition and crisis, and offers a historically grounded critique of public sphere theory. Though she continue to work on broadcasting history, more recently her publications have focused on the idea of listening as a cultural practice, a category of critique and a form of political action, as in her book, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Polity: 2013).
She has worked at Sussex since 1992, teaching media at first in the School of European Studies, then in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, the School of Humanities, the School of Media, Film and Music and now the School of Media, Arts and Humanities. She was Head of Media from 2005-2012, Deputy Head of the School of Media, Film and Music from 2009-2018, and Director of Doctoral Studies from 2012-2019.