Tony Macaluso to speak at Charles Parker AGM

We are delighted to announce that Tony Macaluso will be the main speaker at the AGM of Friends of the Charles Parker Archive Trust on Thursday 16 May.

Tony Macaluso served as director of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive from its conception in 2012 through its launch in 2018. He is currently Visiting Scholar at the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History at the Chicago History Museum (which owns Terkel’s collection) and co-director of the Chapel FM Arts Centre in Leeds where he is guiding radio, education and arts programmes.

Tony will discuss the evolution of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive and useful lessons gleaned from building it for other audio archives.  The presentation will focus on how the Terkel archive was built (and funded) and especially the challenges and opportunities for encouraging creative re-use for other sound archives with examples ranging from Studs Terkel’s posthumous Carnegie Hall debut to the development of a new podcast using sound archives to help younger generations engage with voices and events from the past.

Studs Terkel (1912-2008) was one of the world’s best known champions of oral history and using radio and other media to enact radical listening and long-form conversation to break down barriers and refute cliched thinking about history, social issues, art and living an engaged life.

Over the course of 45 years Terkel hosted a daily radio show on an independent arts station in Chicago, WFMT, assembling an archive of more than 5,600 conversations with many of the most vibrant figures from the 20th century (in addition to publishing 14 groundbreaking and widely read books of oral history).