I am the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production and a Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My teaching and research concentrate on digital media production, the digital humanities, media industries, and the history of American film and broadcasting.
Prior to moving to Wisconsin, I earned my Ph.D and M.F.A. at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. I also worked in the Los Angeles film and television industry -- first for a large talent agency, then for the amazingly talented Miranda July.
I am the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Media History Digital Library, which has digitized over 3 million pages of historic books and magazines for broad public access. I also served as the lead developer of Lantern, the MHDL's search platform, and Arclight, a data analytics and visualization app for the MHDL's collection.
My first book Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014) explores the history of how old movies became valuable. I also co-edited the books Hollywood and the Law (BFI/Palgrave, 2015), The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (REFRAME, 2016), and Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (University of Michigan Press, 2021).
My most recent book, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema's Trade Press, was published in March 2022 by the University of California Press as part of its open access Luminos program. The book is a history of the trade papers that chronicled the early years of Hollywood and spoke to competiting factions within the industry.
For the last few years, I have also been working with Jeremy Morris on developing PodcastRE, a digital archive and analytics platform for podcasts, and collaborating with Stephanie Sapienza on Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection, a comprehensive online collection of early educational public radio content from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Both PodcastRE and Unlocking the Airwaves have been recipients of generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
You can download my complete CV here and e-mail me at ehoyt (at) wisc (dot) edu.