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About Me

I am a cultural historian working on radio and television programmes on literary, dramatic and historical themes in 20th-century Britain. My writing centres around questions of adaptation, intermediality, audience experience and education, exploring the roles of that these mass media had in the cultural and educational lives of individuals from 1922. I have a sustained interest in ancient Greece (especially its drama and poetry) on British radio and television and I have also researched the radio and television work of figures such as Harold Pinter, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas.

I am based in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading, working on the AHRC-funded Harold Pinter Histories and Legacies project (2017-19). I am also Visiting Fellow in the School of Arts and Cultures at the Open University (2018-21), a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Associate Editor of The Radio Journal. 

I serve on the UK Radio Archives Advisory Committee and enjoy curating occasional public engagement events for the British Library and BFI Southbank drawing on my archival research. On BBC Genome’s recent publication online of the facsimilies of Radio Times from the 1930s, I gave an interview on BBC R4’s PM programme and contributed an article to the March 2018 issue of the BBC History Magazine.

My third monograph, Greece on Screen: Greek Plays on British Television, is under contract with Oxford University Press; it will be a companion volume to Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s-60s (OUP, 2015). My first monograph, published in 2011, is a theatre history of the city and University of Oxford. I am currently writing essays on arts and humanities education on interwar radio; oral poetry and the aural imagination; intermedial Pinter. I have edited a number of essay collections. Two that have appeared in 2018 are Ancient Greece on British Television, co-edited with Fiona Hobden (EUP) and Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC, co-edited with Aasiya Lodhi (Media History special issue).

Recent Publications

Books:

• Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC, special issue of Media History 24.2 (2019). Guest co-editor, with A. Lodhi.
• Ancient Greece on British Television, co-editor with F. Hobden. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
• Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s-1960s. Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays, co-editor with S. Harrison. Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

Academic essays in journals and edited books:

 

• ‘Afterlives of BBC Radio Features’, Media History 24.2 (2018), 266-82.
• ‘Introduction. Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC’, with A. Lodhi, Media History 24.2 (2018), 159-65.
  
• ‘Tragedy for Teens: Greek Tragedy on BBC and ITV Schools Television in the 1960s’, in F. Hobden and A. Wrigley (eds.), Ancient Greece on British Television, 84-108. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
• ‘Broadcasting Greece: An Introduction to Greek Antiquity on the Small Screen’, with F. Hobden, in F. Hobden and A. Wrigley (eds.), Ancient Greece on British Television, 1-23. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
• ‘Aeschylus’ Oresteia on British Television’, in R. F. Kennedy (ed.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus, 430-54. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
• ‘The Anger of Achilles: A Prize-Winning “Epic for Radio” by Robert Graves’, in A. G. G. Gibson (ed.), Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition, 315-331. Oxford University Press, 2015.
• ‘Aristophanes at the BBC, 1940s-1960s’, in S. D. Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson, 849-870. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014.
• ‘Higher Education and Public Engagement: Open University and BBC Drama Co-productions on BBC2 in the 1970s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 14.3 (2017), 377-93.
• ‘Television History: Archives, Excavation and the Future. A Discussion’, a dossier compiled with B. Smart, Critical Studies in Television 11.1 (2016), 96-109.
• ‘The Spaces of Medieval Mystery Plays on British Television’, Shakespeare Bulletin 33.4 (2015), 569-93.
• ‘Sophoclean Television: Electra without Subtitles on ITV in 1962′, La Scene en Version Originale, ed. J. Vatain-Corfdir, 55-65. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015. [link]
• ‘Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, “a Play for Voices” on Radio, Stage and Television’, Critical Studies in Television 9.3 (2014), 77-88.
• ‘Introduction. Louis MacNeice, Classical Antiquity and BBC Radio: From Wartime Propaganda to Radio Plays’, in A. Wrigley and S. Harrison (eds), Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays, 1-30. Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

Media Coverage

Social Media

@amanda_wrigley

Country Focus

UK

Expertise by Geography

United Kingdom

Expertise by Chronology

Ancient, 20th century

Expertise by Topic