Of Note: Nick Mason

In March, Professor Nicholas Mason of the English Department delivered the Department of Communication’s Ray and Ida Lee Beckham Lecture for 2011. This annual lectureship is the culminating event in the university’s “Communications Week” and aims to showcase new scholarship on the role of mass media in society. Professor Mason was the first faculty member from outside the Department of Communications to receive this honor. Professor Mason’s lecture, entitled “The Rise of Mass-Media Puffery and the ‘Death’ of Literature in Georgian Britain,” explored the mutually constitutive relationship between literature and advertising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He focused particularly on how the expansion of the British press gave rise to puffery, a new form of literary marketing in which authors and publishers used theoretically objective genres like news stories and reviews to hype their own works.