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Associate Professor
Office Location(s): 5443 North Quad Phone: 734.615.0449 dvail@umich.edu Derek Vaillant's Homepage
I am a historian teaching in an interdisciplinary communication studies department at the University of Michigan. My teaching areas include U.S. communications and cultural history, critical media theory, American music history, and the history of globalization and media technologies. My research has focused on the social and cultural history of American music, sound studies, and the history of broadcasting in the U.S. My current project, Radio Monde: Nationalism and the Cultural Politics of French and U.S. Broadcasting looks at radio as a transatlantic technological, social, and cultural medium linking France and the U.S. in the twentieth century. I have a background in media production and worked for NPR in Washington, D.C. and New York City in research and production, and on a number of documentary projects for Bill Moyers at PBS. I have also performed research for documentary television and radio productions, including The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords, and a long-form radio history documentary released nationally for PRI. My former band, Milk of Wonder, released a 5-song EP, "Wait to Explode" on Incas Records in 1987.
