Sven Kube is a historian of business, technology, and popular culture. After a brief first career as a music journalist he ventured into academia to study the political, social, and economic effects of popular music, film, and literature. Trained in German, Canadian, and American institutions, a distinctly transatlantic outlook shapes Sven’s historical research. His Master’s thesis applied an empirical approach to measuring the success of Canada’s nationalist content quotas for radio broadcasting at home and abroad. His dissertation offers a new angle on the role of Western popular culture in East-West Cold War competition by investigating the agendas of communist managers, policymakers, and artists. Sven has presented his interdisciplinary work to an array of academic audiences ranging from the American Musicological Society to the Business History Conference. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at Florida International University, he has started the process of turning his doctoral thesis into a book while he teaches courses on American popular culture in a global context.
