The Cultures of Early Television

John Wyver writes: I’m delighted to unveil the schedule for the The Cultures of Early Television, a University of Westminster conference that I am convening on 2 and 3 July at Portland Hall in London. Organised with the support of The British Academy, this two-day gathering focuses on television before the Second World War in Britain, continental Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union. With presentations, panels and screenings of rare archival material, the event marks the centenary of the first British public presentation of what John Logie Baird called “true television”, which took place in London in early 1926. The conference brings together scholars and archivists from Britain, Europe and North America to explore imaginings and understandings of early television, and its productions and people, rather than its technologies, which has been the dominant construction of this history to date. One central focus will be early television’s intermedial entanglements with the…