[-empyre-] Sergio Basbaum

[Jonathan Schroeder]

Jonathan Schroeder is the William A. Kern Professor in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology. 
My research generally focuses on the intersection of branding and visual culture. 
I am currently trying to meet the deadline for a book, Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The LP in MId-century America. We examine LP album photography, liner notes, graphic design, and music, to reveal how LPs provided listeners lessons on how to become more culturally confident, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated. The book explores the contribution of consumer artifacts to the imagination and construction of modern US identity and global citizenship. Drawing upon notions of materiality and agency in the constitution of consuming subjects, and informed by critical visual and cultural analysis, we intend to show how peripheral objects, such as record albums, reveal hidden pedagogical aspects of consumer culture.
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