Horace Newscomb

Director, Peabody Awards
Professor of Telecommunications, University of Georgia
Topic: "And a Peabody Award goes to...' An insider's look at the most prestigious prize in electronic media"
May 18, 2006
Webcast

Horace Newcomb is Director of the George Foster Peabody Awards Program and holds the Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabody Awards in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

Newcomb is the author of TV: The Most Popular Art (Doubleday/Anchor, 1974), co-author of The Producer's Medium (Oxford University Press, 1983), and editor of seven editions of Television: The Critical View (Oxford University Press, 1976-2006). In 1973-74 he was the daily television columnist for the Baltimore Morning Sun. From 1994-96 he served as Curator for the Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago) with primary duties as editor of The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television. The 2nd Edition of the Encyclopedia, published in 2004, is a 4 volume, 2,000 page reference work containing more than 1,200 entries on major individuals, programs, and topics related to television in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The MBC Encyclopedia of Television is the definitive library reference work of first record for the study of television. Newcomb is also author of numerous articles in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers.

His research and teaching interests are in media, society, and culture and he has written widely in the fields of television criticism and history. Recent lectures in Italy, Taiwan, Norway, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Korea, Switzerland, and China have focused on cultural exchange and international media industries.

Newcomb received the B.A. from Mississippi College, Clinton, Mississippi in 1964. He studied as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and University Fellow at the University of Chicago, receiving the M.A. in 1965 (General Studies in the Humanities) and the Ph.D. in English (American Literature), 1969. He taught at colleges and universities in Iowa, Michigan, Maryland, and Texas before joining the Peabody Program at the University of Georgia in 2001.