"Saving the sound, spreading the word"
This lecture was delivered on Wednesday 8 June, registration from 5pm, Executive Business Centre, Lansdowne Campus.
Professor Sean Street is a historian, writer, radio producer and presenter, and poet. His work is regularly heard on the main BBC Radio networks, and is also broadcast on Australian, Canadian, Irish and US radio.
As a playwright, his Honest John won the Central Television “Best New Drama” award in 1993, and other plays, including "Wessex Days" and "A Shepherd’s Life", both premiered by Salisbury Playhouse, have subsequently toured extensively. Most recently his one-man play about Charles Darwin, "Beyond Paradise – the Wildlife of a Gentle Man", starring the Royal Shakespeare Theatre actor, Christopher Robbie, has toured both in Britain and internationally to wide acclaim.
He was literature advisor to the Bournemouth International Festival during the early 1990s, and is currently audio consultant to the 2010 Streets of Bournemouth project. He was co-director of Sounding Out 5, a major international conference on sound, at Bournemouth University in September 2010 and is currently working on a major radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 on the audio conservation work in the British Library Sound Archive.
Sean Street has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent being "Time Between Tides – New and Selected Poems 1981 -2009" (Rockingham Press). Other publications include prose works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets. In July 2011, the Atrium Gallery at Bournemouth University stages a retrospective exhibition relating to Street’s poetry, with art work by his daughter, the artist Jemma Street. The exhibition, "Time Between Tides – The Poetry of Sean Street", runs from 14 July – 20 August.
As Professor of Radio in the Media School at Bournemouth University he has written a number of key texts on radio history, including "A Concise History of British Radio" (Kelly Publications) "The Historical Dictionary of British Radio" and "The A to Z of British Radio" (both Scarecrow Press) and "Crossing the Ether – Public Service Radio and Commercial Competition 1920 -1939" (John Libbey Books). He is currently writing "The Poetry of Radio – The Colour of Sound", a work which explores the relationship between poetry and radio, and examines the concept of ‘poetic making’ in sound. The book is to be published by Routledge in May 2012.
In his role of Director of Bournemouth’s Centre for Broadcasting History Research, he has led major projects to digitise UK radio as an online educational resource, including the LBC/IRN Audio Archive, containing approximately 4,000 hours of news output from 1973 – 1996, which is available to academic institutions online via the BUFVC website. The project, funded by the JISC to a total in excess of three quarters of a million pounds, has produced both praise and critical acclamation from academia and the radio industry alike.
