John Sinclair

Biography

John Sinclair is a sociologist by background, working on international media, communication and culture. Based in Melbourne, he is acknowledged internationally for his published work on the globalisation of the media, with particular reference to the television and advertising industries, and with a special interest in the role of language and cultural factors in their development.
Professor Sinclair completed his PhD on the impact of television advertising in Mexico, investigating the ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis prevalent at the time. His subsequent Images Incorporated of 1987 was one of the first books to take account of the emergent global structure of the advertising industry. The globalisation of television via satellite, challenging hitherto mainly national systems, was the focus of an internationally collaborative and influential study of 1996, New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision, with Stuart Cunningham FAHA and Elizabeth Jacka.

In 1999, his Latin American Television: A Global View was published, in which he argued that Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world formed a ‘geolinguistic region’ as an integrated television market. His research interest in the use of media by diasporic communities was elaborated in Floating Lives: The Media of Asian Diasporas, published internationally in 2002, with collaborator Stuart Cunningham FAHA. Sinclair has continued to research in each of these areas, subsequent work being published as the monograph Advertising, the Media and Globalisation in 2012, and the co-edited works Consumer Culture in Latin America in 2012, Latin American Television Industries in 2013, and with Wanning Sun FAHA, Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora in 2016.
Sinclair retired as an Honorary Professorial Fellow from the University of Melbourne, having been a former Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow there, and an investigator on other ARC projects, namely on lifestyle media in Asia, and the history of the advertising industry in Australia.

In his previous academic career at Victoria University, he co-founded the nation’s first BA course in Australian Cultural Studies. He has given guest lectures and held visiting professorships at universities in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Portugal, and Spain, where he was UNESCO Professor of Communication in 1999 at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 2001, and has since served as Chair of the Cultural and Communication Studies Section, 2010-2012, and a member of the Awards Committee, 2013-2018.

In other professional activities, he has been a member of the editorial advisory board of Media International Australia and other Australian and internationally-based journals, and has for many years played active roles in the International Association for Media and Communication Research, including the co-founding of the Media and Diasporas Working Group. In 2021, the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia awarded its Lifetime Achievement Award to Sinclair, ‘in recognition of his decades of research and leadership in Latin American Studies.’