Television before TV

Anne-Katrin Weber is a television historian with a special interest in non-institutional televisual uses and technologies. Her work is at the intersection of media history and archaeology, science and technology studies, and exhibition studies. She holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and is currently a NOMIS Fellow at eikones. Centre for the Theory and History of the Image (University of Basel). Her research has been published in English and French; she has edited several journal issues and volumes.

"Weber's conception of television as diverse and flexible is particularly convincing through her analysis of television exhibitions. Television before TV illustrates the various potential uses of the new technology presented to exhibition visitors and traces the normalization of a specific usage shaped by political and economic interests." - Judith Keilbach, Media Studies, , 3, 2024 (transl. from German) "This impressive work is firmly grounded in extensive, systematic, and detailed archival research in Britain, Germany, and the US. The book contains 100 images which help us to visualize many of the arguments made, and whilst dealing with the multifarious nature of 'television' – political, social, cultural, economic – it is accessible and eminently readable." – Jamie Medhurst, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, issue 18(4), 2023

• Acknowledgements, List of Illustrations, List of Abbreviations, Introduction: Interwar Television on Display, 1. Television Display in Context, 2. Spectacularizing Television, or Making Sense of Novelty, 3. Locating Television Between Imaginaries and Materialities, Intermission I: Four Dispositifs of Interwar Television, 4. Nationalizing Television in a Transnational Context, Intermission II: Travelling Exhibits, 5. Domesticating Television Outside the Home, 6. Gendering Television On and Off Screen, Intermission III: Similar Sets, Same TV?, Epilogue: Television Experiments, Past and Present, Full Bibliography, Index