Dr Edward Allen, the project’s principal investigator, has a background in literary studies and media history. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. He has held research fellowships at the Library of Congress (Washington DC), the Huntingdon Library (San Marino, California), Jesus College (Cambridge), and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge).

Edward has written essays about telephones, church bells, and talking books, among other things; and he has published and edited books about poetry and sound technology, forms of lyric expression, and the intersection of fiction, disability, and the hearing sciences. He is currently researching a book provisionally titled ‘The BBC’s Italian Renaissance’ – among those to feature will be Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Ezra Pound, Robert Rietti, and Ariella Reggio – and he’s collaborating too on a couple of special journal issues connected with the ‘Radio Waves’ project: one on youth culture and trans-European radio, and the other on the politics of broadcasting in and around Greece at midcentury.