Biography

Aniko Bodroghkozy came to UVA in 2001 as one of the founding faculty members of the Media Studies Program. Before coming to Virginia, she taught for five years as an assistant professor at the University of Alberta in film and media studies. She has served UVA Media Studies as Interim Director from 2004 to 2006 and as Director of Undergraduate Programs from 2007 to 2012. She is currently co-director of Media Studies’ Distinguished Majors Program. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her Ph.D in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Communication Arts where she worked with media scholars John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received a Masters degree in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA with High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Professor Bodroghkozy is a media historian with a particular focus on American television, the social change movements of the 1960s, media audiences and reception practices in historical context, and the development of television journalism in the 1960s. More recently, she has been focusing on media and white supremacy in comparative historical context. Her experience as a counter-protester during Charlottesville’s “Summer of Hate” in 2017 motivated her to write her forthcoming book Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right, which will be published by University of Virginia Press in Spring 2022. Her previous books include Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2012) and Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Duke University Press, 2001). Both those works examine how American popular media framed and made sense of 1960s social change and protest movements, as well as how activists in those movements used media to communicate and amplify their positions. Professor Bodroghkozy served as sole editor of a major volume for Wiley-Blackwell in 2018: A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting. This book brought together many of the key scholars in the field of television studies and media history to reflect on the current state and future directions for U.S. broadcasting history. She is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, a narrative history of how the three TV networks handled an unprecedented breaking news story and crisis that would end up defining how television news developed as a journalistic medium. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal; Screen; Television and New Media; Camera Obscura; The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, and in popular online sites such as Slate.com, NBCnews.com, and The Conversation. A recent article drawn from her Making #Charlottesville book appeared in The Boston Globe’s online publication, The Emancipator. Her work has also been frequently reprinted and anthologized in volumes such as Television: The Critical View; Hop on Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture; Critiquing the Sitcom, African Americans and Popular Culture; The Shadow of Selma; Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm; and in Wiley-Blackwell’s series on U.S. presidents, A Companion to John F. Kennedy.

In the Media Studies Department, she teaches American broadcasting history; the history of American broadcast news; media theory and criticism. Topics courses include media in the Kennedy era; media and the civil rights movement; and media and protest in the 1960s. 

Aniko Bodroghkozy is a member of the Graduate Faculty.

Listen to Prof. Bodroghkozy discuss media, white supremacy and the “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville on Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “Democracy in Danger” podcast.

Listen to Prof. Bodroghkozy discuss her book Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. 

Read about Prof. Bodroghkozy’s “1960s Media and Protest” class visit to Special Collections Library to examine Sixties underground newspapers. Profiled in UVA Today.

Read an interview with Prof. Bodroghkozy discussing her book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, with UVA Today.

Books 

Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right | University of Virginia Press, May 2023

Equal Time | University of Illinois Press, Feb 2012

Groove Tube | Duke University Press, Feb 2001

Companion to the History of American Broadcasting | Wiley-Blackwell, 2018