Theatre, Colloquium, Public Events

Sounding the Unseen: Radio Dramaturgy from Wireless to Podcast

What makes radio storytelling unique? How does the medium’s restriction to the auditory sense offer new opportunities for dramatic representation? In this presentation, Caroline Kita offers new perspectives on radio drama, a genre that emerged with the birth of the radio medium in the early 20th century. Her research focuses on the construction of radio story worlds through the core elements of voice, music, noise, and silence, and highlights how the soundscapes of radio dramas offer critical insights into practices of listening and attitudes toward mediated sound in particular cultural moments. Drawing on work from her book in progress, Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Postwar West German Radio Drama, Prof. Kita’s talk illuminates the significance of radio drama in the German context in the aftermath of World War II, and points to the ways that the dramaturgical language of radio dramas from this era continues to shape radio storytelling today in the form of the audio fiction podcast.

 Caroline Kita is an Associate Profesor of Gernan and Conparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as the Director of Graduate Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her research examines German and Austrian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on German-Jewish literature, music, theater, and radio drama.

 

Kita earned her bachelor’s degree in History from Boston College and her doctorate from Duke University. She has studied at the University of Vienna, the University of Potsdam, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. She received a Fulbright Grant to Austria (2004-05), as well as funding for advanced research from the Austrian Exchange Service (Ernst Mach Grant, 2012; Franz Werfel Fellowship, 2015, 2017), and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities (Faculty Fellowship, 2018). Her current book project is being supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2022).

Kita’s scholarship has examined religious and cultural identity in the works of Jewish writers and composers in fin-de-siècle Vienna, critiques of the total work of art, theories of listening and democracy, and sound, space, and time in German-language audiofiction. She is the author of Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater (2019) and co-editor with Jennifer Kapczynski of The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar Germany (2022). Her current book project, Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Postwar German Radio, traces the soundscapes of radio drama as spaces of cultural critique and political commentary in German culture in the aftermath of the Second World War. Her articles have appeared in The German Quarterly, The Journal of Austrian Studies, Monatshefte, and Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. In 2018, she co-edited a special issue of The German Quarterly on Music and German Culture.