Shawn Vancour

Shawn VanCour is an assistant professor in NYU’s Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from Binghamton University.

His research explores the history and preservation of sound and screen media in North America, with combined attention to their technological, industrial, aesthetic, and social contexts. He is author of Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018) and more than thirty articles and book chapters on historical transformations of and strategies for preserving historical and contemporary film, electronic, and digital media productions. His current projects include Understanding Information Preservation: Technology and Cultural Memory (under contract with Polity) and Making Television Work: Professionalizing Postwar U.S. Television Production (in progress). Dr. VanCour teaches courses in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program and broader Cinema Studies curriculum.

Prior to joining Tisch, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of South Carolina, visiting faculty positions at Carleton College and NYU’s Steinhardt School, and a joint appointment in UCLA’s Information Studies and Film, Television & Digital Media Departments, where he founded his school’s Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage. He has worked as a video producer and archival assistant, is a former Sound Fellow of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, and is past director and current co-chair of the Library’s Radio Preservation Task Force.