About the conference
Join us for “The Vibrating World”, the annual English Student Association Graduate Student Conference exploring sound and song with keynote speakers Joseph Straus, Distinguished Professor of Music, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing, composer, and musician. If we take seriously Jacques Attali’s claim that the world is “not legible, but audible,” what scholarly shifts are possible by turning our focus to acts of listening and representations of sound? Sound has long been represented in literature, philosophy, art, and science, but we are only now encountering a ‘sonic boom’ in critical and theoretical writings on sound in the humanities and social sciences. If we scramble our notions of language, what other sounds, voices, musics, or understandings might become legible or audible to us? We will consider the spaces between words, pauses between calls and responses, and the breaths and rests that produce multidimensional rhythms, harmonies, discordances, resolutions, and meanings, the undersong that carries the burden of a song, the chorus, the refrain.
Keynote Lectures:
Joseph Straus, Distinguished Professor of Music, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music.
David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing, composer, and musician.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
9:00-10:15 Session I
Silence, Sound & Liberation (Room 8301)
Redefining Literacy: Silence, Empowerment, and Intersectional Identity in Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness
Anna Zeemont, CUNY Graduate Center
Daring to Speak: Expressions of Female Desire in “The Tale of Apollonius of Tyre”
Jennifer Alberghini, CUNY Graduate Center
“God Save the USA”: Rock Against Bush and the Punk Negation of Anti-Politics
Stefano Morello, CUNY Graduate Center
Acoustic Environments (Room 8304)
Public spaces, everyday sounds: experiencing Alameda’s acoustic environment
Margarita Cuéllar and Ana Garay, Universidad Icesi
Site-Specific Music Composition and the Soniferous Garden
Barry R. Morse
“But What Can Unassisted Vision Do?” Attendant Sounds in Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy
Sean Nolan, CUNY Graduate Center
Reading Moby-Dick as a Sonic Novel
Paul Hebert, CUNY Graduate Center
10:30-11:45 Session II
Sonic Warfare (Room 8301)
Breaking Nature’s Silence: The Traumatic Effects of Anthropogenic Sound
Sarah Hildebrand, CUNY Graduate Center
The Resonance of the Soviet War Song “Dark Nights”
Amy Emery Kraizman, CUNY Graduate Center
Tinnitus and the Soundscapes of Trauma: Toward a Politics of Masking
Micheal Angelo Rumore, CUNY Graduate Center
Landscapes of Nation and the Ungrievability of the Multilingual Subject
Nicholas Glastonbury, CUNY Graduate Center
Listening as Critical Practice (Room 8304)
Queer Resonances: Music, Sound Science, and Homoerotic Desire in Fin-de-siècle British Fiction
Shannon Draucker, Boston University
Listening With William Cowper
Charles W. Rowe, CUNY Graduate Center
The Acoustics of Bare Life in Kafka’s Late Stories
David Copenhafer, Bard Early College
Performances (Segal Theatre, First Floor)
TBA
12:00 PM Lunch
On your own
1:00-2:00 David Rothenberg, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy & Music
Lecture and Performance in Segal Theatre, First Floor
2:15-3:30 Session III
Musical Thinking and Writing (Room 8301)
A Musical Epistemology for the Social Sciences
Matthew Devine, CUNY Graduate Center
Thought Tormented Music: The Dead and the Silence of Literary Song
Dan Jacobson, CUNY Graduate Center
The Mute and the Confidence Man: Herman Melville’s Phenomenology of Silence
Bradley Nelson, CUNY Graduate Center
“Conversation is a game of Circles”: Emerson and Rorty, Rorty and Emerson
Austin Bailey, CUNY Graduate Center
Visual and Aural Aesthetics (Room 8304)
Wordsworth’s Symphonic Landscapes: Romantic Cymatics and “Ingenious Nonsense.”
Rasheed Hinds, CUNY Graduate Center
“hard to imagine a country”: Neighbors, Gossip, Friends, and Empathy in David Antin’s “Talking” and “Talking at the Boundaries”
Elizabeth Bidwell Goetz, CUNY Graduate Center
What is the Music of the Language of the Color?
Andrew Demirjian, Hunter College
“I’ve never seen a magazine played this professionally before!” Cable Access’s “TV Party” and Carnivalesque Resistance
Seth Graves, CUNY Graduate Center
Sonic and Textual Archives (Room 8400)
Audio Archives in a Digital Era: Approaching Recorded Materials in New American Poetry
Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, CUNY Graduate Center
“Not a Sound but an Emotion”: Rudolph Fisher’s “Common Meter,” Bessie Smith, and the “St. Louis Blues”
Aidan Levy, Columbia University
Not What The Siren Sang: Sound Poetry in the Archive
Zack Brown, University at Buffalo
Close-Listening Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers”
Cherrie Kwok, New York University
Performances (Segal Theatre, First Floor)
TBA
4:00-5:00 Joseph Straus, Distinguished Professor of Music
Lecture in English Department Lounge, Room 4409
5:00-6:15 Reception
English Department Lounge, Room 4409
For more information, visit the conference website here.
Cosponsored by the English Student Association, The PhD Program in English, and the Ecocriticism Working Group
