Andrew Simon Featured on the Phantom Power Podcast

Professor Andrew Simon, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies, was recently featured on the Phantom Power podcast to discuss how cassette tapes and players served as the media of the masses long before the internet entered our daily lives.

A historian specializing in media, popular culture, and the Middle East, Simon explores this subject in greater depth in his 2022 book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt. (Stanford University Press). 

On the podcast, Simon is joined by Eleanor Patterson, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn University and author of Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television, and Rob Drew, Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University, and author of Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable. The conversation "winds its way from the early days of radio, through the Anglophone indie rock of the 1980s, and into the streets of Cairo, where cassette tapes represented the first mass medium that Egyptian state power could not control."

Here's a link to the episode.