Richard Butsch of West Windsor presented “The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Public, and Individuals,” his latest research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication on December 1. He tracked the ways in which audiences have been enmeshed in political discourses featuring movie audiences in the 1910s and 1920s, radio audiences in the 1930 and 1940s, and the television audiences of the 1950s and 1960s. The book will be published in 2007.
Butsch is a professor of sociology at Rider University. For three decades his scholarly pursuits have focuses on media, culture, and consumption. His publication, “For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption” examined the commercialization of leisure. His publication, “The Making of American Audiences from stage to Television, 1750-1990,” yielded the International Communication Association Best Book Award and the American Culture Association Cawelti Book Award.
In 2001 he presented “Theater as Public Sphere: Audience as Publics” at Northwestern University during an international symposium on French and contemporary theater.
