Department of English

Podcasting has become one of the most popular ways of disseminating the voice, supplanting radio. It has even been a primary driver of the growth of music streaming services like Spotify. This creative-critical seminar situates the podcast historically, analyzes current instantiations of the genre, and teaches hands-on skills to create your own podcasts. The course will examine antecedents to the podcast, including early twentieth-century radio plays (The War of the Worlds), avant-garde audio productions, and oral histories (Studs Terkel). Alongside this historical arc, we will listen to and analyze a range of podcasts, including serialized narrative works, analytical podcasts, and interview-based series (Serial, S-Town, The Truth, SongExploder, etc.). The course features an alumni speaker series, with visits from course alumni who have done important audio work as part of their Penn curricula and after. We will listen to these works and you will have the opportunity to discuss them with their producers. You will also learn audio production techniques to make your own podcasts and you will have the opportunity to produce different genres. No prior experience with audio editing is necessary, only an interest in experimenting with sound.