Helen York, doctoral student in History, awarded a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Grant for 2009-2010

Posted April 8, 2009

Helen York, PhD student in History has been awarded a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Grant for 2009-2010. The Consortium includes 18 major historicalinstitutions with collections and archives broadly representative of all parts of New Englandand spanning the period from before the sixteenth century to the present day. York's research deals with the underlying conscious and unconscious social structures that determine how modern electronic media history is preserved.  Her immediate focus is the loss of the audio record of the broadcast medium of radio, especially radio produced by marginalized segments of society. During her researchvisits to the Maine Historical Society, The Rhode Island Historical Society and the Schlesinger Library as part of her Consortium Fellowship, York will examine the records of regional broadcasters, French-language radio stations and women in NewEngland broadcasting to search forpatterns of historic social disenfranchisement . "This is not about Jack Benny or Wolfman Jack, " said York, "This research is about the radio that's really not there, because it wasn't considered important enough to keep. Thatboundary between what we choose to add to History and what we choose to forget is what really interests me."