Associate Professor Jason Jacobs and Associate Professor Frances Bonner, along with Professor Michele Hilmes have been awarded an ARC Discovery Grant in 2014.
The title of their project is "Persistence in Television" and "investigates the way television program content modulates over time to retain audiences, even when the audience itself fragments across different reception technologies. It explores the substantial degree of stability in both fiction and non-fiction programming by considering a range of British, Australian and American texts which have been altered to remain relevant, been sequentially adapted to reflect contemporary preferences, and been made as local versions of international formats. It uses empirical and qualitative methods to compare programs from the beginning of mass broadcast television in Australia, the UK and the US. Outcomes will include a scholarly monograph and several articles."
ARC Discovery Grants are highly competitive and show EMSAH to be at the cutting edge of important research.