Sage Goodwin

Research Topic

Civil Rights and Television News - 'Framing the Civil Rights Story: Prime-Time Television News and the Struggle for Black Freedom 1954-1968'

Supervisor: Professor Stephen Tuck

Conventional understandings of television’s role in the struggle for black equality hold that, by shining a spotlight on Southern racial brutality, the new medium converted a previously indifferent national audience to the cause of the Civil Rights Movement. However, historians of the struggle for black freedom have stated rather than studied the role of television.

My thesis explores the multiple ways television news covered the struggle for black freedom over time. But it recognises that television news was a result of its social context as much as it contributed to the shaping of society. It goes beyond the final product of coverage to consider the interactions between television news and civil rights from all angles. I trace the complex interplay between what was shown on screen, the decisions made behind the scenes at every level to produce it, and how viewers at home both black and white reacted. Through this fully integrated approach I map the shifting contours of the dialectical relationship between the evolution of television news and the progression of the struggle for black freedom. 

Professional Service:

I am the co-founder and co-convenor of the 'Cultural Histories, Cultural Studies' seminar, a weekly seminar which explores the methodologies and theories relating to cultural studies across a range of disciplines. Our speakers have included Oxford's Regius Professor of History, Lyndal Roper, New York University's Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and visual activist Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Goldsmiths' Professor of Communications, David Morley.

I was the 2018-2019 Director of the Oxford Research Center in the Humanities (TORCH) Race and Resistance Network, a network which hosts weekly public events ranging from lectures, reading groups, and panel discussions, to book launches, networking events, and film screenings. Through this programme, Race and Resistance aims to provide a space that transcends disciplinary boundaries and the divide between the university and the city to connvect scholars, students, and local activists, enagaging with the rise of and resistance to racials hierarchies in Oxford and beyond.

Funding: Oxford-Urquhart-Rothermere American Institute scholarship

Academic Background:

MSt US History, Balliol College, Oxford. (2016-2017)

Winner of the Rothermere American Institute's Carwardine Prize for most outstanding student on the MSt course.

Winner of the History Faculty Prize for best dissertation in American and Gloval History.

BA (Hons) in History, St. Hilda's College, Oxford (2012-2015)

Contact: sage.goodwin@univ.ox.ac.uk