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Tona Hangen


Ms. Hangen’s first book, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion and Popular Culture in America (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 2002) explores the rhetorical and organizational strategies of evangelical Protestant radio preachers and their contribution to the development of broadcast media and popular culture in mid-twentieth century America. Using the listener letters of ordinary Americans, she demonstrates that radio became an important part of believers’ religious practices and consciousness, by generating new forms of community and heightening the social power of previously marginalized religious groups. She explains the embrace of mass media by religious groups typically seen as “anti-modern,” whose deep involvement in American culture and politics transformed the second half of the twentieth century. Redeeming the Dial was named one of the “Dozen Best Books on the History of Media and Religion” by American Journalism magazine, and won the 2003 New England Popular Culture Association’s Book Award. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on radio and religion, including the forthcoming chapter, “Speaking of God, Listening for Grace: Christian Radio and its Audiences,” in Michael C. Keith, ed., Radio Cultures (New York: Peter Lang, in press for 2008).

In her current research, Ms. Hangen explores areas of intersection among American culture, the media, religion and key American institutions in the 20th century. Her current work in progress is a wide-ranging cultural history of the United Nations in America, tracing its fluctuating fortunes in U.S. foreign policy and domestic public opinion, its veneration as a pilgrimage site and consecration as an American sacred space, its portrayal in film, literature and art, documenting in particular the work of religious non-governmental organizations—whose influence and participation in the UN community is steadily growing. Public reflection on the UN serves as a window onto American culture from 1945 to the present, focusing cultural anxieties about U.S. identity and the nation’s place in a world rapidly transformed by forces of secularization (and its parallel, the rise of religious fundamentalism), globalization, and new social and demographic imperatives.

Ms. Hangen has taught courses in American Studies at Brandeis since 2002, including Religions in America, Radio in American Culture and (in 2007) Images of the American West in Film and Culture. She also teaches in the History department, including (in 2007-2008) US History 1600-1877, US Women’s History 1600-1865,  and a new course, US Native American History. She serves as one of the leaders of the Brandeis Pauli Murray Diversity Fellows Seminar, bringing together students working on campus projects related to diversity (named for a notable past American Studies professor). She has written book reviews for many journals including the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History.

This page was last modified on October 26, 2007