Conveners:
Gabriel Saloman Mindel is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC and an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research considers ways that people produce and struggle for space using sound to extend beyond the limits of their bodies, particularly in formal and informal modes of protest. His long involvement with Sound and Culture as an area of study, and as a performer, composer and curator will contribute an interdisciplinary perspective on sonic production and affect.
Alex Ullman is a first year PhD student in English at UC Berkeley studying global modernisms. He is primarily interested in how modernist literature is distributed through sound technology and how sound serves as literary device for representing ethnicity in modernity. Alex provides a perspective on the twentieth century for the second meeting on “Sound and the Literary,” and he will also serve as an organizer and facilitator for the three meetings. As a jazz musician, he also seeks to record a literary-musical piece for the final publication.
Participants:
Chip Badley is a PhD student in English at UCSB where he is affiliated with the Literature and the Mind initiative and the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind. He is at work on a project concerning oral testimony, eloquence, and affect in antebellum antislavery writing and performance. Chip’s research foci in literature and psychology will contribute to meetings on sound and the literary as well as the cultural.
Harry Burson is a PhD student in Film & Media at UCB interested in film sound technology and aesthetics. He is primarily interested in questions of immersion and the role that sound plays in the production and experience of real and virtual spaces.
Miranda Butler is a fourth-year PhD student in English at UCR, where she studies the relationship between Victorian media technologies and evolutionary biological discourse. Her work in science studies investigates the physical representation of sensory experience, especially sound, providing an interdisciplinary perspective to the group, especially as we discuss sound and the material.
Monica Chieffo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Musicology, Experimental Critical Theory, and Early Modern Studies graduate certificate programs at UCLA. Her primary research takes a material culture approach to sound in the early modern period, especially around the advent of purpose-built theaters for music on the Italian peninsula. Monica foresees her work intersecting in productive ways with the working group, especially for the meeting themed Sound and the Material.
Wayne Spencer Coffey is a sixth year student in History of Consciousness writing a dissertation on the relation between the production of visual and popular culture concerning African-American “inner cities” and the reproduction of poverty, violence, and underdevelopment in those communities. His primary site is Baltimore, Maryland, and his specific purpose for participation in the Sound Studies Cluster is to investigate how African-American music is used to produce “authentic” film and televisual narrative about urban communities.
Stephen David Engel is a second-year PhD student in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where he is writing a theory of co-present dialogue that figures it as a form of poiesis, on the one hand, and a ground for political uprising, on the other. For this project, Stephen will draw on western and non-western poetics, Sound Studies, critical pedagogy, philosophies of relation, and feminist and biological theories of the body.
Max Kaisler is a first-year doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She is trained in Latin, Ancient Greek, and German and is working on a designated emphasis in Film Studies. Though her work principally investigates questions of madness, medicine, grief, and romantic disappointment, at the moment she is particularly interested in Sound Studies as they relate to antiphonal elements in ancient elegy and modern avant-garde poetry, the sonic inheritance of trauma, and modern methods of musical/anti-musical punishment and surveillance.
Alina Larson is a PhD student in Cognitive Psychology at UC Santa Cruz, where she studies spontaneous communication and psycholinguistics with a focus on multimodal speech perception and social interactions. Her current research explores what qualities of speech help establish positive human-human interactions, and how these qualities may be implemented in human-computer interactions (HCI) to help them feel more natural. Alina’s research on psycholinguistics and HCI will help inform discussions of Sound and Culture in particular.
Sean Matharoo is a Ph.D. student of Comparative Literature at UC Riverside, where he studies francophone and anglophone speculative media. He is researching noise as it manifests in sound-image relations and the poetics of space in the contexts of postcolonial theory and ecological philosophy. He has a forthcoming article in a special issue of Horror Studies devoted to sonic horror and is working on a multimodal performance involving chimeras, noise, drone, audiovisual diagrams, and the sampling of “dead” media technologies.
Amanda Modell is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, where her research focuses on several convergences between sound, music and the hereditary sciences. These convergences include Pandora’s Music Genome Project, eugenic experiments on human musical ability, and the evolution of whale song. Amanda will contribute her knowledge of feminist science and technology studies throughout the group’s tenure, but it will be particularly appropriate to the first meeting on Sound and the Material. She will also contribute to organizational tasks as needed.
Darci Sprengel is a PhD Candidate in ethnomusicology at UCLA. She is primarily interested in the non-discursive and affective potential of sound and music especially regarding issues of citizenship, belonging, and dissent under authoritarian conditions. Her dissertation examines how Egyptian DIY musicians use music/sound to engage public feelings of depression, schizophrenia, and paranoia in the aftermath of the “failed” 2011 Egyptian revolution to produce new modes of affective citizenship. She is also interested in looking at how race, gender, ethnicity, and class are sonically constructed. As such, her research will contribute to the third meeting on “Sound and Culture.” She is also a violist.
Sudhu Tewari is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Cultural Musicology at UCSC. His research has tended toward investigations of technology’s role in shaping modern musics and instrument builders and sound artists who challenge traditional conceptions about music. Tewari is also an improvising musician, recording engineer, instrument builder and sound artist.
Faculty Advisor:
John Jordan is Research Professor of Literature and Director of the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz. His recent essay on “Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop” takes a Sound Studies approach to the study of this “noisy” novel, drawing connections between the sonic effects used by Dickens and the eccentric theory of sound recording and retrieval proposed by Dickens’s contemporary, Charles Babbage.