FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – March 3, 2026 CONTACT | Heather Birks | 202.602.0584
The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation Presents the 2026 Broadcast Historian Award to The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance by Lauren Bratslavsky, Illinois State University and Elizabeth Peterson, University of Oregon
Washington, D.C. – The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation (LABF) is pleased to announce the winners of its 2026 LABF Broadcast Historian Award are Lauren Bratslavsky, Illinois State University and Elizabeth Peterson, University of Oregon, for their book, The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance.
This anthology critically evaluates archives and archival processes that collect, order, and preserve elements of television as historically, culturally, socially, politically, and economically significant material.
What do we know about how television moved from ephemeral broadcasts and mounds of paperwork documenting bureaucratic and creative processes to become historical material housed in archives? This book’s guiding principles are to interrogate where television as historical material “lives” and to collect the stories of some ways television preservation has been and continues to be deeply circumstantial and idiosyncratic.
Bringing together work by academics, archivists, and practitioners, the book offers insights into the archival processes that confer television programs with historical value. With a focus on television’s archival spaces, the book contributes more broadly to theories, histories, and practices of archiving. Likewise, the theories and questions about archives provide insights into the specificities of the medium, the relations between technologies and culture, the political economy of the culture industries, and the minutiae of television’s “place” in American society.
Lauren Bratslavsky is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University’s School of Communication. Her research related to mass media and archives is published in American Journalism, The Moving Image, Film & History, and in the inaugural issue of Journal of 20th Century Media History. She is also involved with the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force.
Elizabeth Peterson is a Digital Collections Librarian and former Curator of Moving Images at the University of Oregon. Her articles on Oregon film history have appeared in The Moving Image, Film History, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Iluminace. She is the co-founder and editor of the Oregon Theater Project website.
The LABF supports a broadcast archive housed at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Bratslavsky and Peterson have graciously agreed to donate a copy of their book to the archives. They will be recognized at BEA’s annual convention Opening Awards Ceremony in Las Vegas on the evening of Friday, April 17 and will receive a $2,500 check in recognition of the award.
In 2015 LABF and BEA partnered to establish the annual Broadcast Historian Awards. With the support of LABF, BEA annually provides two $2,500 awards to educators who have published books or produced creative work specifically related to broadcast history. A call for the 2027 Broadcast Historian Awards will be available in early summer. For more information, visit www.BEAweb.org.
About the BEA Convention – BEA’s annual convention is held in conjunction with NAB Show in Las Vegas every spring. BEA’s annual convention attracts 1,300 educators and students with 250 sessions, events, research panels, technology workshops and an exhibit hall, making BEA the largest conference partner of NAB Show.
About the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) – BEA is the professional association for professors, industry professionals and graduate students interested in teaching and research related to electronic media and multimedia enterprises. There are currently more than 2,500 individual and institutional members worldwide. Visit www.beaweb.org for more information.