Professor Smulyan is currently researching and writing about the connections between the public arts and the public humanities and what one approach can learn from the other.  She remains interested in twentieth century U.S. cultural history in transnational perspective and in the history of radio. 

Susan Smulyan has received several research grants and fellowships, from Brown University, the Ford Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Duke University Library, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Fellowships

Senior Fudan Fellow, Department of History, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, October 2018-January 2019

Research Fellow, Scholars and Artists in Residence Program, Australian National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, June 2010

Visiting Professor, Ogilvy, Sponsored by the Advertising Education Foundation, Summer 2009

J. Walter Thompson Research Fellowship, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Library, $1,000, April 2001

Grants –

PI, Community Grant, American Studies Association to American Studies Department/Center for Public Humanities for programming at the Providence Community Libraryies

PI – International, Australia Research Council, $450,000; Globalising the Magic System: a History of Advertising Industry Practices in Australia, 1959-1989.  Worked with a team from the University of Melbourne; University of Technology, Sydney; and University of Essex, UK. 

Principal Investigator, Brown-Tougaloo Summer Research Project, $65,000: Funding came from the Ford Foundation ($20,000); Brown President's Office ($20,000); Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantships ($15,000); Provost's Office ($5,000); and the Dean of the College's Office ($5,000). Three faculty members and six students spent two weeks at Brown and eight weeks at Tougaloo working in the Civil Rights Movement Archives

Coordinator, contract between Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and The Center for Children and Technology, Educational Development Center, $75,000. Design and implement WWW site for middle and high school students and teachers. Six months, awarded 9/97.

Principal Investigator, grant from the Educational Opportunity Fund, Smithsonian Institution, to Lemelson Center to fund Teacher Advisory Group for WWW project, $35,000. One year, awarded 9/97.

Principal Investigator, subcontract with the Slater Mill Historic Site, "Preserving Our Endangered Past: A Series of Workshops," funded by National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, $22,000 (subcontract, $6,000)

Principal Investigator, National Endowment for the Humanities, Higher Education Focus Grant, "Introducing American Studies: A Collaborative, Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Course," $25,000, 1996; final report published on the WWW: http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/syllabi/brown-intro

Principal Investigator, "Discovering Science and Technology Through History," proposal of the Society for the History of Technology to the National Science Foundation, $358,000, awarded July, 1990 for two years; supplemental grant, $70,000, awarded August, 1992. Designed interdisciplinary curriculum for the social studies classroom. Wrote and edited eight units (100 activities) focusing on textiles.

Books

Editor, Doing Public Humanities (Routledge, 2020)

With Kathleen Franz, eds., Major Problems in American Popular Culture (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2011).

Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century (Philadelphia, PA; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920-1934 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).

Book Chapters

With David Goodman, “Portia Faces the World: Rewriting and Revoicing American Radio for an International Market,” in Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes, Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era (NY: Routledge, 2013): 163-179.

“The National Barn Dance, Early Broadcasting, and Radio Audiences” in Chad Berry, ed., The Hayloft Gang (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008): 119-129.

“Now It Can Be Told: The Influence of the United States Occupation on Japanese  Radio,” in Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, eds. Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (New York: Routledge, 2002): 301-317.

“Arguments over Broadcast Advertising,” in Jim Cullen, ed., Popular Culture in American History (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001): 166-201.  Reprinted from Selling Radio

Articles

“Absence and the Advertising Historian,” Special issue, The History of Australian Marketing: Local and Global Perspectives  Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8:3 (August 2016).

“Perry in Japan: A Transnational, Digital and Pedagogical Project,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy XXII:1 (Spring 2011/Summer 2011): 69-79.

“Live From Waikiki: Colonialism, Race, and Radio in Hawaii, 1934-1963,” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 27:1 (March 2007). 

“Everyone a Reviewer? Problems and Possibilities in Hypertext Scholarship,” Forum on Hypertext Scholarship, American Quarterly 51 (June 1999): 263-268.

 

HONORS

Delegate, American Studies Association to the Japanese Association for American Studies, 2001

Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning at Brown University, 1997

Robinson Prize, Best Paper Presented by a Young Scholar, Society for the History of Technology, 1984

 

Professor Smulyan revised and taught AMST 2540, "Methods in Public Humanities" dividing the course into two parts, "Managing Public Humanities" and "Tools for Public Humanities."  In many ways, this course builds on the second year course for American Studies PhD students, "Methods in American Studies" which Professor Smulyan taught for many years.  In that course, PhD students examined the discipline of American Studies through an innovative historical approach (pairing classic works with revisionist ones; using the ASA program as a text; and asking students to lead discussions on ideas in American Studies). The course also presented an extensive reading list on pedagogical theory; served as a workshop for student written course syllabi; and hosted guest speakers on the state of academic publishing and granting organizations as well as the challenges facing American academia.

Professor Smulyan has also taught large lecture courses ("American Popular Culture"and "American Advertising: History and Consequences") as well as  seminars in radio history, the public sphere, and transnational American popular culture.  She has team-taught courses on Digital Scholarship, taking up how new media has changed teaching, research, and the public presentation of scholarly work and interrogating how on-line practices have blurred the lines among these categories.