Getting to know...Andy Ruddock
Name: Andy Ruddock
Title: Senior Lecturer
Faculty/Division: Arts; School of Media, Film and Journalism
Department: Communications and Media Studies
Campus: Caulfield
How long have you worked at Monash? Since 2007.
Where did you work prior to starting at the University? I spent 10 happy years teaching at John Moores University, back in Liverpool.
What do you like best about your role? My education was quite interdisciplinary, and I really enjoy the fact that my research and teaching gives me the space to figure out how a lot of the things that I learned as an undergraduate history major help us to understand today’s media culture.
Why did you choose your current career path? I’d planned on a military career after university, but got ill and became unfit for service right after graduation. I looked into doing postgrad studies in journalism, but then found out about media studies. I’d always been interested in the politics of popular culture, so I enrolled in an MA, and the rest just went from there.
First job? Dish washer.
Worst job? Executive management trainee for a bank.
What research/projects are you currently working on and what does it involve? I’m really interested in the Hungarian-American media scholar George Gerbner. Gerbner’s famous for his argument that media violence contains a range of political messages, especially about gender and power. He also had a fascinating life story – he was a highly decorated soldier, and a committed political activist. There’s a new archive of his personal correspondence, and I’m trying to get to that to figure out the back story of how he developed his ideas. My feeling is that his understanding of the nature of media power was far more sophisticated than people think, and also that in many ways his ideas are more relevant today than they were during his lifetime. So I will be working on those ideas for a while. I’m also doing a book for Sage called Exploring Media Research.
What is your favourite place in the world and why? Amherst, Massachusetts. I had a great time doing my PhD there, sharing a house with my best mates.
What is your favourite place to eat and why? The restaurant next to my parents-in-law’s house in Tianjin, China. We pack all of the aunties and cousins in, order about two dozen Northern Chinese Halal dishes, and have a right old laugh. And it still barely breaks $100.
What is the best piece of advice you have received? “Don’t join the Royal Navy now." Delivered to me by my Dad, who was a serviceman, when I was 16. Actually it was more of an order, but how right he was.
Tell us something about yourself that your colleagues wouldn’t know? I played tenor horn in the Ellington Colliery Band. Just like Brassed Off. But not as good. Although I can do a more convincing northern English accent than Ewan McGregor.