[csaa-forum] The Passing of John Fiske

[Jon Stratton]

On July 12, John Fiske passed. He had lived and worked in the United States at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1988 where he was Professor of Communication Arts. John retired in 2000 going on to develop another career in antiques having set up the company Fiske and Freeman with his wife Lisa Freeman in 1994.


Before leaving for America John had come from the Polytechnic of Wales to an appointment in the School of English at what was then the Western Australian Institute of Technology in Perth. By the time he left, the School of English had become the School of Communication and Cultural Studies, and WAIT had transformed into Curtin University of Technology in 1986.


John arrived at WAIT having recently published, with John Hartley, the foundational book in the cultural analysis of television Reading Television, published in 1978. During his time at WAIT/Curtin, John worked with Graeme Turner. In 1987 John and Graeme, along with Bob Hodge, published Myths of Oz, a foundational work in the evolution of Australian Cultural Studies. In 1982, shortly after arriving at WAIT, John published Introduction to Communication Studies, a book written at the Polytechnic of Wales and completed at WAIT. Also in 1987 John published a second intervention in television studies, Television Culture.


Along with Graeme at WAIT, and John Frow and John Hartley at Murdoch University, John was a key figure in the development of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, the first issue of which came out in 1983. The AJCS subsequently transformed into the American-based journal, published by Taylor and Francis, Cultural Studies in 1987 but that is another story.


All this is to say that John played a major role in the foundation and development of both Communication Studies and Cultural Studies in Australia. For John, with his critical interest in semiotics, there was huge overlap between those two disciplines and his influence in this regard continues to this day.


Vale John.


An obituary can be found at: https://bostoncremation.org/obituary/john-fiske .


Jon

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