Representing Representatives: Parliaments in transforming media ensembles in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom during the twentieth century

My PhD on ‘Public Politics: The coming of age of the media politician in a transnational communicative space, 1880s-1910s’, in which I used new digital methods, offers novel perspectives on political and media history. I aim to valorize these perspectives through submitting a manuscript to Cambridge UP and journal articles to Media History and Past & Present, as well as finalizing two chapters for edited volumes. I will also prepare an FWO proposal on how parliaments competed for media coverage in increasingly competitive ‘attention economies’. The study aims to go beyond current scholarship by integrating media and parliamentary histories and thereby questioning existing narratives and caesura. I will compare debates on introducing radio, photography and television into the Belgian, Dutch and British parliaments, using digital databases of parliamentary proceedings and newspapers. The photography case study will be completed and submitted to Contemporary European History. Finally, I plan to participate in public debates about the ‘mediatization’ of politics and the need for media education in schooling.

Keywords:Entangled media history, Parliamentary history, Digital humanities, Mediatization of politics, Attention economy

Disciplines:Modern and contemporary history