David Hendy

David Hendy has been teaching media history at the University of Westminster in London for the past 16 years. He studied history at the universities of St Andrews and Oxford, before joining the BBC as a trainee reporter in 1987. During his time at the BBC he produced news programmes and documentaries for the Corporation's main radio channel, Radio 4, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union and a range of European and British political events. He's the author of Radio in the Global Age (2000) and Life on Air: a History of Radio 4 (2007), the latter winning the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize. In 2009, Dr Hendy was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in the University of Cambridge, where he explored the impact of the First World War on the earliest generation of broadcasters. His main research interest lies in the relationship between media and cultural life since the late-nineteenth century, and he's currently working on a book called Media and the Making of the Modern Mind -the subject of five programmes in The Essay series that he'll be presenting on BBC national radio in 2010.