This research presentation will focus on our newly launched Insight Development Grant Project to be conducted in collaboration with CKUA Radio, Canada’s oldest public radio station. Founded in 1927, CKUA was launched by the University of Alberta’s Department of Extension as an alternative to educational outreach through in-person lecture circuits in rural Alberta. Broadcasting initially from the UAlberta campus, the station focused from the outset on literary readings, dramatic performances, music concerts, and academic lectures. UofA faculty continued to develop CKUA radio programming for over 40 years following CKUA’s departure from campus, first under the Radio Service, and then the Department of Radio and Television (RTV). The CKUA archives, both at its downtown Edmonton location and related archives of RTV held at the UofA Archives, offer valuable media and textual records of the station’s role in shaping diverse creative cultures regionally and nationally. Our talk will open up questions about the place of literary radio in the study of culture, methodologies for listening in radio studies, and protocols for preserving, describing, and activating radio literary archives. We will also share our archival findings of materials that document the University of Alberta’s longstanding contributions to the development of literary radio.  

Mike O’Driscoll is Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories and his interest in material culture studies has focused on poetry and poetics, archive theory, book history, writing technologies, petrocultures, and the study of sound, listening, and literary audiotexts. O’Driscoll is a Governing Board Member of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Group and has edition of Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems has just been released by MIT Press.

Sean Luyk is the Digital Curation Librarian at the University of Alberta Library where he is responsible for the University of Alberta’s Aviary repository, and is a co-investigator on the SpokenWeb project. Sean is an Affiliated Researcher of the Sound Studies Institute, and a Fellow on the AVAnnotate Project, an Andrew W. Mellon funded digital humanities application for sharing annotations of audio and video artifacts and making digital exhibits and editions with AV materials.

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