Michael J. Socolow is the director of the McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine and is a media historian whose research centers upon America’s original radio networks in the 1920s and 1930s. His scholarship on media history has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Technology & Culture, and other scholarly journals. He is the author of Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). He was awarded the 2018 Broadcast Historian Award by the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation and the Broadcast Education Association for Six Minutes in Berlin.

He is also a former broadcast journalist who has worked as an Assignment Editor for the Cable News Network and as an information manager for the host broadcast organization at the Barcelona, Atlanta, and Sydney Olympic Games. He has written pieces on media regulation and media history for Slate, Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review, and other journalistic outlets.