In the rapidly evolving field of podcast studies, Siobhán McHugh is a leading scholar and internationally recognised podcast critic, producer, and author. She is founding editor (2014) of RadioDoc Review, a rare collaboration between industry and the academy and the first journal to develop critical analysis of narrative podcasts and crafted audio documentaries. In 2022, Siobhán was consulting producer on a landmark queer history/true crime podcast, The Greatest Menace, hosted by journalist Patrick Abboud. Published by Audible in 2022, it investigates a ‘gay prison’ and has been dubbed ‘Australia’s S-Town’. It has won fifteen major awards, including Best Social Justice podcast at New York Festivals (NYF), Podcast of the Year and Grand Prix (all media) at the UK Drum Media Online awards and a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism (equivalent of a Pulitzer).

Siobhan's book, The Power of Podcasting: telling stories through sound, was published in Australia in Feb 2022 and globally Oct 2022 by Columbia University Press, where it was among its most requested Fall titles. Siobhán has published on the aesthetics of crafted narrative podcasts and on podcasting as a new medium in scholarly journals, academic blogs and public outlets such as The Conversation and Harvard University’s Nieman Storyboard. In 2022, Siobhán established a Hub for Innovation in Podcasting (HIP), a coalition of producers, researchers, fans and students of podcasting. Her article, How Podcasting is Changing the Audio Storytelling Genre (2016), is the most-cited in The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, and another, The Narrative Podcast as Digital Literary Journalism: Conceptualizing S-Town (2021), won the John C Hartsock Award for best article in the Literary Journalism Studies journal.

In other practice-based research, Siobhán partnered with leading Australian newspaper The Age to transform investigative journalism into a compelling aural storytelling format. This yielded the hit podcasts Phoebe’s Fall (2016), about the bizarre death of a young woman in a garbage chute, Wrong Skin (2018), about the clash between Indigenous culture and corporate interests, and The Last Voyage of The Pong Su (2019), which examines a drug heist by a North Korean cargo ship on Australia’s southern coast. All three won gold in the New York Festivals as well as many other awards, with ‘Pong Su’ named by the Global Investigative Journalism Network as among the best investigative journalism podcasts of 2020. Siobhán has also had numerous solo audio features commissioned by ABC Radio National. In 2019 she was Consulting Producer on a groundbreaking podcast from the Supreme Court of Victoria, Gertie's Law, which won her a sixth gold at New York Festivals. As Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded research, Siobhán developed an award-winning podcast, Heart of Artness (2018), co-hosted with Margo Neale, Head of Indigenous Knowledges at the National Museum of Australia, to explore cross-cultural aspects of contemporary Aboriginal art. She was also consulting producer on Motherlode, a podcast that investigated early hacktivism and the back story to Julian Assange.

Siobhán presents on podcasting at gatherings such as the Global Editors Network summit, where she spoke alongside the producer of Serial, the world’s most downloaded narrative podcast, and via her MOOC, which had over 35,000 participants from 150 countries. She has been a keynote speaker at events such as the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union assembly at Chengdu, China, whose members broadcast to over three billion people. She continues to collaborate with ABU broadcasters from the Pacific to Vietnam, where in 2022 she was an invited guest of the Voice of Vietnam state broadcaster, spoke at the National Radio Festival and taught podcasting to over 100 VoV broadcasters.

In Oral History Studies, McHugh’s article, ‘The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio’ (2012), is among the most-cited articles in the US-based Oral History Review. It was selected alongside pre-eminent scholars such as Portelli, Grele and Frisch as one of 15 articles chosen for a special 2016 virtual issue “to showcase some of the most influential work published in the journal” to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the US Oral History Association. It has also been included in the Oral History Reader, an anthology of the foremost international scholarship in oral history, edited by Alistair Thomson and Robert Perks (Routledge 2016).

McHugh's oral histories formed the basis of her four acclaimed books of social history, most recently The Snowy, a history of the hydroelectric scheme and its largely migrant workforce, republished in 2019 after its 1989 first edition, which won the NSW State Literary Award for Nonfiction. Minefields and Miniskirts, about Australian women's role in the Vietnam war, was published in 1993 (Doubleday) and 2005 (Lothian) and made into a musical, directed by Terence O'Connell, which toured Australia and played to over 200,000 people. Cottoning On, an investigation into the troubled irrigation system and use of pesticides in the Australian cotton industry, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's History Prize. Shelter From the Storm (Allen & Unwin 1999) told the stories of refugees, Indigenous people, migrants, single parents, LGBTQI+ and people with disabilities, along with others who lived in social housing projects. Her original oral history collections are held in the National Library of Australia and the State Library of NSW.