Michael C. Keith is an American media historian and author. He has served as a faculty member of the Boston College Communication Department since 1993 and is the author of some two dozen books on media. He is one of the country's foremost authorities on the social impact and role of radio in American culture. He has lectured in Russia, Spain, Tanzania, and at several institutions in the U.S. and Canada. He was appointed emeritus professor in 2017 upon retiring from Boston College. Keith served as a visiting professor at George Washington University and Marquette University and Director of Telecommunications at Dean College. He frequently appears in both American and foreign media as an authority on electronic media. Prior to becoming a full-time academic in the late 1970s, he worked as a broadcast professional for more than a decade. Keith's substantial published output melds his own experience, a network of contacts in and beyond the radio business, and careful research, to produce solid analysis of what a growing number of people in and out of the industry see as the growing crisis of broadcast radio. A number of his books have been co-authored with Robert Hilliard, now retired from Emerson College. The team usually works with Keith conceiving the topic and doing much of the initial legwork research and Hilliard taking on the initial book manuscript draft. They both work on the final version. Their co-authored works, and those of Keith alone, often tackle controversial topics such as the demise of local radio programming ; the legal intricacies of indecent or even obscene programming ; the use of radio by extreme hate groups, a title on President Clinton's summer reading list one year; and the use of radio by Native Americans, the first monograph to appear on that topic. Keith has been a Stanton Fellow of the International Radio & Television Society and received the Distinguished Scholar Award given by the Broadcast Education Association and the Achievement Award in the Humanities by the University of Rhode Island. In addition to his many media books and academic articles, Keith has written a well-reviewed memoir of his unconventional childhood years — The Next Better Place — as well as a coming of age novel, Life is Falling Sideways. He has written an ever-expanding list of short stories, which have appeared in numerous online journals, such as The Literati Quarterly, The Penmen Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, and annual anthologies. Collections of his stories are available in paperback editions and in ebook formats; these include Hoag's Object, And Through the Trembling Air and Of Night and Light, Sad Boy, Everything is Epic, The Collector of Tears, If Things Were Made To Last Forever, Caricatures, The Near Enough, Bits, Specks, Crumbs, Flecks, Slow Transit, Perspective Drifts Like a Log on a River, Let Us Now Speak of Extinction, and Stories in the Key of Me. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Pen/O.Henry Award, among others.
