Ann Gray

Ann Gray is Emerita Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK and from 2006 to 2010 was Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded Televising History 1995-2010 project.  She is a co-founding editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and has published widely on media, audiences, cultural theory and methods.  From 1989 to 2002 she was based in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.

History on Demand

In what has been described as the Digital and Online era of Television this chapter asks how history programming has changed from that produced within the Broadcast and Network models of television to new forms of production, circulation and consumption afforded by digital and online technologies.  Following my work on Televising History, which examined the commissioning, production and range of programmes produced by a relatively small and influential group of broadcasters inspired by public service and commercial imperatives I now address the online environment and ask how we are to think about the role of television as public historian?  Taking a limited number of examples of online activity, this chapter traces the continuities from linear television into this practice and asks how we might conceive of the outputs in relation to public history.