Martha Bayles

Fellow

Associate Professor of Humanities at Boston College

Martha Bayles’s recent work appears in The Atlantic, The American Interest, The Hedgehog Review, and the Claremont Review of Books (for which she writes quarterly on film and long-form television). Her most recent book, Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad, was published by Yale University Press in 2014, and was described by American Diplomacy as “the freshest and most original treatment of US Public Diplomacy in many years.”

She is also the author of Hole In Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music and Ain’t That a Shame? Censorship and the Culture of Transgression.

She is currently completing a study of the dangers to independent journalism around the world. Her work in progress is a book about the importance of “voluntary restraint” in the American tradition of free speech. Since 2003, she has taught humanities at Boston College.

Bayles received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Master’s in Education from the University of Pennsylvania.

Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad. Yale University Press, 2014.

Ain’t That a Shame? Censorship and the Culture of Transgression. Institute of United States Studies, University of London, 1996.

Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music. Free Press, 1994; paperback, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Monthly column on global media culture, American Interest (2016-present).
“Shadow Play,” film and television column, Claremont Review of Books (2006-present).
“Hearts and Minds,” culture and foreign affairs blog, World Affairs (2010-2011).