Radio dramas, that is, dramatic works staged to be broadcast on the radio, have long been marginalized in literary studies. Although in many cultural traditions the format attracted writers of “serious literature,” it has more often been associated with the popular forms of the soap opera, detective stories, or science fiction, which have not always received the same amount of scholarly attention. Moreover, as many of these texts were also performed on stage or developed as teleplays and films, even novels, the acoustic dimensions of their dramaturgy (the elements designed with the sonic format of radio in mind) are often overlooked. Yet, the growing popularity of the podcast format over the last decade has inspired new attention to radio storytelling traditions past and present – not only in the US and European contexts, but on a global scale (Verma 2012, Gomia 2012, Rea 2016, McEnaney 2017, Gunner 2018, McMurtry 2019, Huacuja Alonso 2023). These studies have illuminated the role that radio drama played as a force of colonialism, in the formation of national identities, and as forms of cultural critique. Inspired by recent scholarship on transnational radio research (Badenoch and Föllmer 2018) and building on new volumes on the global radio play (Morse 2020, Lohr and Milz 2024, Procter 2024), this seminar aims to initiate a conversation on transnational radio drama from a literary studies perspective. It invites papers from scholars working on this genre in any language or from any cultural tradition. Questions we hope to explore include:

• How can we read radio dramas through a transnational lens? How does a transnational approach to radio drama help us to identify aspects of the genre that we might miss in a purely national (or monolingual) context?
• How have processes of translation and adaptation shaped radio storytelling and the reception of these works in different cultural contexts? What role have radio and audio drama played in the constructions of the idea of World Literature?
• How have the acoustic languages and forms of radio drama storytelling evolved over time? What kinds of collectives and collaborations have made transnational radio storytelling possible?
• How have international radio drama and podcasting competitions shaped the genre and its reception?
• What modes of storytelling do radio dramas employ to capture movement of people and cultures (stories of migration, exile, repatriation, etc.?)
• How can we as scholars approach the study of radio drama texts and recordings as archival documents (and address what has been lost to the interventions of colonializing powers or the migration of these works in the aftermath of war or other political conflicts?) How do we deal with the often fragmented textual and acoustic states of these works?
• How has the advent of streaming radio and podcasts shaped acoustic storytelling across cultures?

We would like the seminar to span the virtual and in-person parts of the conference for those unable to travel.