Ira Wagman
Associate Professor (on sabbatical)
| Department: | School of Journalism and Communication |
Biography
I am an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies, with a cross-appointment with the Institute for the Comparative Study of Art, Literature, and Culture. I also hold research affiliations at Carleton with the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, the Carleton Centre for Public History, and the Centre for European Studies. I hold a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University in Montreal.
Over the past 20 years I have held several visiting appointments. I am a former Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. I also held an Erasmus Mundus Visiting Professorship at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Arhus University and at the University of Amsterdam. Finally, I have held guest professorships at SUNY-Plattsburgh, the University of Freiburg, the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In winter 2025 I will be a short-term visiting professor at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal.
Teaching
I teach in several areas across our undergraduate and graduate curriculum. This includes core courses in media studies and communication theory as well as specialized courses focusing on media in the Canadian context, on media industries, and on media and communication ethics. I have also taught special topics exploring the relationship between communication and time. I was one of the first recipients of a Teaching Achievement Award offered by the Faculty of Public and Global Affairs.
I am happy to supervise MA and PhD students pursuing research in any of these areas or in the specific areas mentioned in my research profile.
Research Profile
My work covers three broad areas of study: Media history, communication theory, and the study of the entertainment industries. A few main themes cut across these different areas:
- An interest in television as a form of entertainment, as a site for the circulation of culture, as a source for theorizing about media, and as way to study media regulation and communication policy.
- A focus on how different kinds of media technologies are used in different contexts – for education, for dissemination, and as a “tool” for doing things in the world
To carry out this work I use of a range of historical and interpretive methods, including archival research, policy analysis, and media-theoretical criticism.
My current research focuses on the impact of the Catholic Church on the historical development of television in Quebec in the 1950s and 60s and on the emerging field of “media studies”. This work further considers the value of thinking of the relationship between the history of television and urban history. Another project focuses on developing mid-range ethical frameworks for dealing with the ubiquity of online personal memory, using the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” as inspiration. Finally, I have written about Toronto’s CN Tower (both on my own and in joint work with my colleague Liam Cole Young) to think about the relationship between media and verticality.
Please see the list of publications below for published work in these areas, along with earlier research on Canadian cultural policy and on the use of television at UNESCO in the 1950s.
Je souhaite également continuer à développer mon engagement à travailler et à écrire en français. Je suis autodidacte et je suis fière de publier mes recherches dans ma langue seconde et de contribuer davantage aux travaux que j’ai effectués au sein de jurys académiques et artistiques.
Selected Publications
Edited Anthologies and Journals
“Restituer (le temps)/ Rendering (Time)”. Co-edited with Vincent Bouchard. Special issue of Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, volume 33, Spring, 2019.
“TV Genres in the Age of Abundance”, Special Issue of Communicazioni Sociali, co-edited with Massimo Scaglioni.
Culturalindustries.ca: Making Sense of Media in the Digital Age. Co-edited with Peter Urquhart. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 2012.
Intersections of Media and Communications: Concepts and Critical Frameworks. Co-edited with Will Straw and Sandra Gabriele. Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2011.
Recent Book Chapters and Journal Articles
« Église, télévision et célébrité dans la presse catholique des 1950 au Québec ». In La fabrique journalistique des célébrités. Eds. Adrien Rannaud, Maude Marcotte, et Mélodie Simand-Houde. Montreal : Presses de l’Université de Montréal, Accepted, now in revisions.
“Up and Out: Verticality and Mediality at Toronto’s CN Tower”. In Media Building: Architecture, Design and the Spatial Politics of Mass Communication. Eds. James West, Wil Mari, and Carole O’Reilly. London: Palgrave MacMillan. In press.
“Remarkable Invention!”, History of Media Studies 1:1 (October 2021), 7pp. https://doi.org/10.32376/d895a0ea.ef8f548f
“Between Canadians and Culture: The First Year of the CRTC”. In Canada’s 1968: A Year and its Legacies. Edited by Christopher Kirkey, Andrew Holman, and Michael Hawes. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2021, pp. 175-194.
“Should Canada Have an International Broadcasting Service?”. In Canada’s Public Diplomacy. Edited by Nicholas Cull and Michael Hawes. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 161-172.
“Small, Middle, Test: Rescaling Peripheral Media Markets”. In Digital Peripheries. Edited by Paul Stepan, Pavel Zahradka, and Petr Szczepanik, Berlin: Springer, 2020, pp. 15-35.
“On the Mediality of Two Towers: Calgary–Toronto”, Co-authored with Liam Cole Young. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. 10:2, 2019, pp. 6-37.
“Three Canadian Film Policy Frameworks”, In Oxford Companion to Canadian Cinema. Edited by Will Straw and Janine Marchessault. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 3-20.
“Talking to Netflix with a Canadian Accent: On Digital Platforms and National Media Policies”. In Reconceptualizing Film Policies. Edited by Nolwenn Mignant and Cecilia Tirtaine. New York: Routledge. 2017, pp. 209-221.
“Bureaucratic Celebrity”. In Far and Wide: Celebrity Culture in Canada. Edited by Katja Lee and Lorraine York. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016, pp. 201-218.
“Of Home Teams and Visiting Players: Imports and Substitutions in Canadian Professional Sports Media”. In How Canadians Communicate: Sports. Edited by Christopher Waddell and David Taras. Athabasca University Press, 2016, pp. 117-136.
“Locating UNESCO in Histories of Communication Study”. In The International History of Communication Study. Edited by Peter Simonson and David Park. Routledge, 2015, pp. 71-89.
“Forgiving Without Forgetting: Contending with Digital Memory”. In Sharrona Pearl, ed. Images, Ethics, Technology. New York: Routledge. 2015, pp. 111-125.
Recent Conference Presentations and Invited Lectures
“The Beginning of the Present: Pay TV, Screen Convergence and a Golden Age of Canadian Film”. Paper co-written with Peter Urquhart and presented at the Annual Meeting of the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada, Montreal, Quebec, June 2024.
“Teaching Television in the Pages of Quebec’s L’Action Catholique, 1952-60”. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, Massachusetts, March 15, 2024.
“Platforming the Circulation of (Some) Canadian Television”. Paper presented at conference, “Platforms and Uses: Cinema, Television, Video Games, and Digital Creation”, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, November 3, 2023.
“Fashioning Televisual Celebrity in Quebec’s Catholic Press, 1952-1962”. Paper presented at conference, La fabrique journalistique des célébrités: Vedettariat, presse, et culture médiatique dans la francophonie nord-atlantique (XVIIIe – XXIe siècles), University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, April 27, 2023.
“On Media Policy and the Ethics of Digital Memory: Appreciating the ‘Right to be Forgotten’”. Invited lecture, Institut für Politikwisschenschaft, TU-Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, October 24, 2022.
“The CN Tower and the Vertical Imaginary”. Paper presented at symposium, “Vertical Media”. York University, Toronto, Ontario, October 21, 2022.
“What is the Lifecycle for Audiovisual Content in the Age of Streaming?”. Paper co-presented with Petr Szczepanik at virtual pre-conference, “The Impact of Streaming on Media Industries and Cultural Production”. European Communication Research and Education Association (Media Industries and Cultural Production Section), Arhus, Denmark, October 17, 2022.
“The CN Tower and the Production of Vertical Spectacles in 1970s Toronto”. Paper presented at virtual conference, “Media Building”, Northumbria University and the Salford School of Arts, Media, and Creative Technology, United Kingdom, July 7, 2021.
“The Art of Living in Media Time”. Invited lecture as part of the Institut Français series “La nuit des idées”, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, January 30, 2020.
“Keywords for Studying the Circulation of Audiovisual Content on SVOD Services”. Paper co-presented with Petr Szczepanik at the conference “The International Circulation of National Cinemas and Audiovisual Content”, Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy. September 17-18, 2019.
“McLuhanism and the Celebrity Media Executive”. Paper presented at “Edgy Media Symposium: On Borders, and Media Studies”. School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, March 1, 2019.