Office: 002C Calvin HallMichael Krysko's research and teaching specialties focus on the history of technology, mass media, and U.S. foreign relations. His most recent book is Contested Airwaves: American Radio at Home and Abroad, 1914-1946 (University of Illinois Press, 2025). It explores how the medium engaged the knowledge, assumptions, and prejudices that fueled listeners’ and policymakers’ objections to foreign and unwelcome radio content across a period encompassing two World Wars. Topics include Americans’ antagonism toward non-English language broadcasting; issues of identity, geography, and sovereignty that propelled opposition to Mexico’s “border blaster” stations; how a project aimed at helping Cajun-speaking listeners became a French-only celebration of Acadian culture; a failed initiative to teach English to Latin Americans via shortwave broadcasting; enduring US–Panamanian conflicts over the control of radio in and around the Panama Canal; and how farmers from across the Southwest protested a radio treaty’s perceived preferential treatment of Cuba. Paying particular attention to the act of listening, the study strives to show how these initiatives illuminated and solidified divisions rooted in identity, nationalism, and prejudice. His previous book American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919-41 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011) also considered the intersection of radio with conflict and discord. It explores how US radio initiatives in East Asia often amplified the international tensions that pitted Americans against Chinese nationalists and Japanese imperialists in the years before the Pacific War. His work has also appeared in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, the Journal of Contemporary History, Pacific Historical Review, and Technology and Culture.
Dr. Krysko earned his Ph.D. at Stony Brook University in 2001 and spent five years on the history faculty at Dowling College in New York before joining the Department of History at Kansas State University in 2006. Dr. Krysko has served on the Executive Board of the Mid America American Studies Association from 2008-2016, and served a term as President of that organization in 2011-12. He served as the chairperson of the Department of History from 2015-2021.