Personal Statement
Hannah Spaulding is a Lecturer in Digital Screen Studies in the Department of Communication and Media. Prior to joining the University of Liverpool, she worked as a Lecturer in Television Studies at the University of Lincoln. She held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship with Concordia University’s Media History Research Centre and received her PhD in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University.

Her research explores histories of technology and domesticity, with a focus on television, gender, and surveillance. Her current book project examines the history of “useful television” in the American home throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. She is also working on a project on the histories of home surveillance technologies, concentrating currently on the baby monitor.

Research Overview
My research explores the cultural history of media technologies, examining both their dominant applications and their more marginal and speculative uses. I look at successful and “failed” technologies, seeing both as important to understanding the social, cultural, political, and economic history of media and everyday life. In particular, my work has focused on television, examining efforts to turn the medium into a “useful” instrument of household management that could provide opportunities for creative expression, romantic connection, home education, care, and security. More broadly, my work explores the connections between technology and the domestic, examining how new media are and have been closely intertwined with the discourses, fantasies, anxieties, and politics of home and family life.