Her Academic Life: How Siobhán McHugh Helped Build a Scholarly Home for Podcasting

And why this matters to everyone in this industry

Feb 05, 2025

Siobhán McHugh has spent decades immersed in the art of narrative audio—not just making it, but dissecting it, teaching it, and shaping how the rest of us understand it. McHugh has worked in audio for longer than most podcasters have been alive. Her career began in radio in Ireland, back in the early 1980s. McHugh was forced to emigrate to Australia after she lost her job at a radio station because she booked a guest who spoke openly about contraception (a story that’s captured in the award-winning 2018 BBC audio doc A Sense of Quietness, produced by Eleanor McDowall, of Falling Tree Productions). She has gone on to work as a producer, and then an academic, for more than 30 years.

Every so often, based on my reading, my interviews and my listening (to the end of the long credit rolls), I pull back to get a 30,000 foot view of the industry. I look for overlaps, new voices, concepts that repeat, innovative ideas or techniques that bubble to the surface. This year I couldn’t help but notice something new.

More and more people I’m speaking with for Bingeworthy are connected to, or affiliated with, an academic institution. This is partly a reality check on where stable employment opportunities lay. But I believe it’s something more than that.

In the last few years, universities worldwide have begun formalizing podcasting as a subject of study. What was once dismissed as a scrappy, DIY medium is now emerging as a legitimate academic pursuit, with courses, research, and dedicated journals analyzing what makes a podcast work, and established journals accepting articles that investigate narrative podcast work from a variety of disciplines. This moment—where podcasting moves from the fringes to a serious field of study—has been a long time coming; and McHugh is at the center of this shift.

Come Gather Around My Soapbox…

From here, you might hear me yell about the importance of the connection between cultural criticism and public awareness. Without critics covering trends that emerge from new shows and new voices, we have no hope that the public will begin to grow an awareness of narrative podcasting. This past election cycle has reminded us that the term ‘podcasting’ itself has been hijacked by populist bro-casters. There’s work to reclaim this (or refine a definition to be more inclusive…or maybe it needs to be exclusive).

But there’s another prong in that fork: academic institutions. They are not public-facing, and frankly, they’re largely inaccessible. But they are very important.

Maybe take a pill that helps you to feel optimistic about the future, and gather round…

If academia accepts podcasting as an area of study, it could allow more students to pursue narrative podcasting as a subject, or as a project within other disciplines. When I’m feeling optimistic, I can see how this demand will expand the number of academic institutions that offer this as a field of study. Students could then turn their research papers and dissertations into conference papers and then eventually, actual journal articles, which will help grow a farm of podcast-related citations, that will inevitably force it to grow as an academic discipline.

In time, these academic concepts will filter out into mainstream media, with the help of critics and reviewers. This is what becomes cultural criticism, where journalists and writers use new language tools to discuss form and style. Increased awareness from the media leads to more awards, which is mirrored in the academic setting with grants and residencies…which all help to grow legitimacy and build careers.

If this sounds whack, I should share that I watched this happen in real time while at university in the 1990s. Before then, pop culture was not considered a legitimate form of academic study. This was when grunge music (Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana) exploded on the scene and hip-hop went mainstream (Tupac, The Notorious B.I.G.) Seminal films like Slackers and Singles and Sleepless in Seattle pulled it all together as a cultural moment.

As a student of critical theory, the only way to cite these emerging concepts was Rolling Stone or Wired Magazine…which until this point was generously thought to be common slog from the perspective of a professor. But as the ‘twenty-something’ students moved through the academic strata, this all began to change. The growth of the study of popular culture as a high-brow art form, something serious and worthy of fellowships, and major gallery installations. This was all laid out (and legitimated) in the 1991 hit book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland. The major called Cultural Studies began to appear on different campuses.

I see this as part of a wider equation

As more of the public listens, fans will buy tickets and subscriptions, the industry grows in terms of funding, and more academic institutions recognize narrative audio as an artistic and scholarly pursuit.

The other thing institutions do is employ the people who then make the genre-pushing works (two examples are Empire City, by Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Cement City, by Erin Anderson and Jeanne Marie Laskas). All of these producers shared with me in their interviews that they could not have spent the years (upwards of five years) to do the work that they did were it not for the fact that they are all employed by a university. Both series have gone on to multiple acclaim.

From the Field to the Lecture Hall

For years Siobhán McHugh worked as what she called an ‘oral historian,’ through her work as a freelance producer. These were the longform interviews that were the primary resource of her radio documentary work, some of which went on to be published as books; both of which opened doors for invitations to present at academic conferences that crossed over into oral history. She would periodically attend, but for twenty years, she worked as a freelance producer and writer.

Then one day she picked up a major Australian newspaper and noticed that her work had been largely ripped off by a journalist, without any credit to McHugh.

[Siobhán McHugh]: And so I got onto the editor and said, this is outrageous! They don't even credit my work. They have just piggybacked on this stuff…I did all the hard slog.
And she said, what you do can't be considered research. It can't be considered research unless it emanates from a university. And I was absolutely incensed…I was furious.
But that kind of planted the seed.

This experience set off a chain of events. She took her experience with compiling oral histories and applied for a scholarship to an innovative PhD program that accepted creative practice as acceptable research. This position gave her a baseline income security and the freedom to work on other projects.

[Siobhán McHugh]: I ended up studying the links, the intersections and synergies between oral history and the radio documentary feature form. That was my study. But as part of that, I conducted I made a two hour radio documentary series, which went on the [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] ABC, which had to be separately commissioned and pitched.
There was enormous anti-Irish sentiment in Australia for many years, because of our Republican and anti-colonialism tendencies.
I wanted to investigate that before it disappeared. I was sick of being considered the same as the English establishment we had fought against for so long. And I thought I could do that best through oral histories. And I thought if I could just do it through mixed marriages, I'd be able to get love and romance and even nice wedding frocks into it.
So that's what I did…but there was a very serious underpinning that gave me lots of data, that allowed me then to leave that there, as the creative work, and then do a 90,000 word research thesis which examined seriously the scholarship that looked at oral history, journalism, radio documentary craft—where they could all support each other, or where they diverged.

The work that she’s referring to is Marrying-Out, which was a 2-hour audio documentary broadcast on ABC, and won Gold at the New York Radio Festival in 2010. From here, she went on to land a professorship at the University of Wollongong, about 90 miles South of Sydney, where she established what was likely the first academic course in podcasting in 2016.

To begin, this is a brilliant approach to managing one’s own career. But more than that, I want to recognize the quiet work McHugh has done to help shape this industry.

The base material for academic writing is your literature review

I wondered, what was available to McHugh when she wrote her thesis almost 25 years ago? When we spoke recently on Zoom, I asked her to tell me what works she cited in her literature review.

[SMcH]: Well, there was nothing about really. Podcasting was just time-shifted radio [at that point]. The tech people were doing their geeky stuff, but I wasn't interested in that. So in terms of storytelling and documentary, it was the BBC, it was the ABC…it was audio on demand, but it wasn't in any way adapted to a podcast first world.
In America, the big two, obviously, were endlessly discussed where This American Life and Radiolab. I remember being really thrilled when I found one chapter by David Hendy in a huge big tome of a book, which is all about radio. He's a very eloquent writer, and he does a beautiful job of describing things like the montage, non-narrated montage works, the artifice, etc.
The other book that was coming out was John Biewen's Reality Radio [first edition in 2010]. I read somewhere it was coming out. I wrote to John. I didn't know him from a bar of soap. I wrote to him and said, you know, I desperately need this, can you send me an advanced copy? I'm finishing my thesis and I can't find anything to cite. And he did.
Some of the people who were in it, like Natalie Kestecher, she sent me a Microsoft Word copy in advance of it being even published so that I had something to work with.
That was how nascent it was.
Nobody was reflecting on their work. Audio stuff just went out there and disappeared. And the only people who knew about it were fellow audio people, or some random person who happened to catch you in the car when they were driving somewhere and might say something to you if you ran into them at the shop the next week.
And that goes back to the 1930s, that great phrase: “the ghastly ephemerality of radio,” that was used by a BBC producer, Lance Sieveking, from 1932 I think. All this work [of his went] into these amazing features at the BBC, and then they're gone. There's no record of them and you can't hear them again.

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In 2013, McHugh founded Radio Doc Review which blends a scholarly approach with a more casual interview approach to narrative audio discussion. It’s been a trailblazer for academics and adjacent writers to publish articles about narrative audio. Although it has taken time to be “seriously” considered among other academic journals, the job is underway. However, if one were to base the impact of how this helped to inform other journals, based on McHugh’s extensive citation list, I would say that it has formed a gateway for more mainstream journals to accept podcasting as a form worthy of scholarship. After more than a decade of oversight, McHugh passed the torch as Editor but remains part of the Editorial Board.

When I asked her who taught her how to do podcast criticism, she shared this story with me:

[SMcH]: The only reason I did it was because there was such a gap and a dearth of it. I was moved to repay the favor that John Biewen had done me.
We know now that John is a really decent guy, but I didn't know that at the time. He could have been anyone. And he made this program for This American Life about a massacre of Dakota Indians in the town he grew up in, in Minnesota. And I knew nothing about the topic…it was long before we developed collectively a much stronger awareness of Indigenous First Nations issues in the last 10 years. This was about 2012.
I listened to it. And I suppose I had developed an academic practice of listening very carefully or making notes, because you need to go back and document and where to use time stamping and stuff like that because you need to reference things for any kind of academic work so I had developed that practice.
And so I had certain points like a voice came in at a certain point. And I thought, I don't know who that person is…why are they coming in here? I made some, some notes. Some things were assumed that I knew, which I didn't, listening in Australia. I didn't know certain things and he didn't fill us in.
Other things I felt were over-explained and oversimplified, and held up the sense of engagement with the narrative and the pace. And then there was a bit where I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder why he didn't use sound?’ Anyway, I just privately sent him all my thoughts with little timestamps.
I said in the email, look, I hope you don't mind…I just made these notes and I thought they might be useful. But he was just…”Oh my God, this is so valuable! Nobody ever does this.”
We need to hear the stuff that doesn't work to actually get insights from somebody from a different cultural background, who's not constrained by social niceties of friendship, or being a colleague. It was very rare.
And so he then listened to my program [Eat, Pray, Mourn], and he wrote back with his comments on that to me privately in an email.
And so that's where the germ [for Radio Doc Review] formed. And then I tried to shape it so that it would meet some kind of academic criteria

For the last decade, McHugh has worked as a producer on a number of award-winning podcasts. She has taught a generation of students, and now in early retirement does guest lectures, and welcomes invitations to conferences around the world where the global community of people working to build the academic track for podcast studies.

In 2022, McHugh published The Power of Podcasting, which can be bought directly from the Columbia University Press.

In many ways, the book reads equally like a memoir as a rare how-to resource. It breaks down S-Town in terms of structure; it analyzes the actual narrative scripts with Before/After edits that she used in the various series she has worked on, from Phoebe’s Fall, to Wrong Skin and The Last Voyage of Pong Su. She offers a list of seminal narrative series and places them in categories of genre and sub-genre, which to my mind emerges as a master list of industry work and trends up to around 2021 before the book was published.

As both a practitioner and an educator, McHugh has fostered the academic legitimacy of podcasting and inspired a generation of researchers and producers to follow in her footsteps. She has helped create the primary resource for podcast criticism. Her work has helped to bridge the gap between creative practice and academic research. She is a bricklayer for the future of this industry.