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Clik here to view.This year’s American Studies Association meeting in Baltimore, Maryland (October 19th-23rd) marks a real tipping point for Sound Studies within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies.  First of all, there was the publication of Kara Keeling and Josh Kun’s co-edited special issue for American Quarterly, Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, this past September 2011. Packed with 17 cutting-edge essays—culled from a record breaking 80+ submissions—this must-read issue is, according to Keeling and Kun’s introduction, “a sign not only of sound’s quantitative currency but the promise of its future as a field of ongoing inquiry, and its importance and relevance to the future of American Studies itself” (452).  In addition to its vibrant blend of emerging scholars and senior folk, the issue is notable for its head-on engagement of sound and power in multiple, intersecting dimensions: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national identity.  The issue’s intervention tracing the aural edge to U.S. citizenship privilege is especially important, and game-changing for both American Studies and Sound Studies. If you have access to Project Muse, you may download the entire issue (or selected essays) through this link here. The issue also kicks off a new audio-visual web interface for American Quarterly, and you can look here to see and hear more from several authors in the issue.

We at Sounding Out! are proud to be mentioned in the introduction to AQ’s Sound Clash and to have five members of Team SO! featured in the issue: yours truly, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, and guest authors, D. Inés Casillas, Nina Eidsheim, Tara Rodgers, and Gayle Wald. Look for Sounding Out! posts in 2012 from more of the AQ special issue’s contributors, including Mack Hagood, D. Travers Scott, and Roshanak Kheshti. If you are headed down to B’more and you’d like to hear from many of these folks in person, American Quarterly is sponsoring a roundtable panel on Saturday, October 22nd, bright and early at 8:00 a.m. at the Hilton Baltimore Holiday Room 5.  It will be moderated by Josh Kun (USC) and will feature Kara Keeling (USC), Asma Naeem (University of Maryland, College Park), Dustin Tahmahkera (Southwestern University), and Roshnak Kheshti (UCSD) as panelists.  Look also for unscheduled guests to appear from the issue, such as Gayle Wald (George Washington) and myself (SUNY Binghamton)—ASA rules do not permit formal participation in more than one panel—and know that, despite the early tip-off time, Keeling and Kun will be taking full advantage of the session to give Sound Clash an enthusiastic and proper send off.  Between now and then, I’ll be frantically figuring out how to clone myself, because a couple of the issue’s contributors, Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland) and Barry Shank (Ohio State), are unfortunately scheduled in two excellent competing sound studies panels that very morning (scroll down for full details)!  Hopefully, when the ASA Sound Studies Caucus gets fully up and running, there will be less tortuously tantalizing research pile-ups like this one.Image may be NSFW.
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That’s right, I said the ASA Sound Studies Caucus.  If the publication of the AQ special issue wasn’t awesome enough news, the word on the street is that next year, I may not have to do Sounding Out!’s beloved ASA conference pre-game round-up. Sound Studies is in the process of gaining that all-important indexing in the front of the American Studies Association conference program through the brand-new Sound Studies Caucus.  Through ASA, the caucus is hoping to sponsor specific sound-related panels for forthcoming ASA meetings. This year’s reception is a planning session where interested parties can introduce themselves and become more involved in some of the caucus’s administrative tasks.  The official meet up takes place on Saturday, October 22^nd from 4-6 p.m. at the upstairs bar area of the Pratt Street Ale House (206 W. Pratt Street) and Team ASA SSC will be selling limited edition T-Shirts to fund raise for the group. Interested folks can join the Sound Studies Caucus Googlegroup in advance of the meeting and catch the latest breaking news.

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Clik here to view.The ASA Sound Studies Caucus came out of a 2010 working group of UC faculty called “Sounding Race” generously funded by a UC Humanities Research Institute Grant.  The caucus centralizes race, gender, and sexuality to the study of sound and vice versa; in the words of their grant: “A new direction in sound studies suggests that sound, indeed, racializes, queers, and genders both the speaking subject as well as the listener.”  The grant was authored by Deborah Vargas (UC Irvine), Roshanak Kheshti(UC San Diego), D. Inés Casillas (UC Santa Barbara and frequent Sounding Out! blogger), and Kevin Fellezs (formerly at UC Merced, now at Columbia University). We at Sounding Out! are thankful for their scholarship, enthusiasm, and their critical administrative labor; we look forward to hearing more from this collective both at the caucus meeting and at the sure-to-be-excellent roundtable: “ASA Committee on Ethnic Studies: Sounding Race” on Friday October 21st, at 10:00 a.m. in Hilton Baltimore Peale B. It will be moderated by Herman Grey (UC Santa Cruz) and will also include Kirstie Dorr (UC San Diego). Look for me at both events—I will be the one live-Tweeting furiously with a huge grin on my face, excited to be gathering with so many Sound Studies colleagues from across ASA’s many (inter)disciplines.

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Recording for the Baltimore Soundscape Project

In addition, I will be representing Sounding Out! on a panel organized by Nicole Hodges Persley (University of Kansas) and sponsored by the American Studies Women’s Committee called “Digital Displays: Women Imagining Blogospheres as Alternative Public Spheres,” on Saturday, October 22nd from 2:00p.m. to 3:45 p.m. at the Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 4.  I will be joining Tanya Golash-Boza (University of Kansas, author of the blog  Get a Life, Ph.D), Judy Lubin (Howard University, author of the blog Judy Lubin’s Leading Voices) and Jamie Schmidt Wagman (Saint Louis University) in a conversation about the role and power of blogging in contemporary academic careers.  In particular, my paper, “Sounding Off About Sounding Out!: Emerging Scholars in an Emerging Field” will focus on the mission and history of our blog and its interventions in the problem of access for women, junior scholars, and scholars of color.  Sounding Out! will continue the conversation beyond Saturday afternoon by publishing excerpts from my paper post-ASA.  We hope that you will join us, either in person or by contributing your thoughts and comments when that post eventually goes live.

Below you will find Sounding Out!’s picks for panels, papers, and events of interest to Sound Studies scholars at ASA 2011.  We’d like to thank IASPM (the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music for compiling the Popular Music Panels a few weeks back and add that our version of course understands “sound” more broadly: you’ll find music panels among work on urban soundscapes, theorizations of listening, research on sound and space, sound and race, sound and citizenship, as well as new research in the digital humanities for those interested in blogging and other audio-visual technologies, methodologies, and pedagogies.  In addition to panels, I have also copiously trolled through the program looking for events of interest to sound studies scholars as well as individual papers housed on panels not ostensibly or exclusively about sound (another important measure of the health, usefulness, and influence of Sound Studies methodology across the board).  If you find that I have missed you—or have placed your paper here in error—drop me a line at jsa@soundingoutblog.com and I will rectify the situation ASAP.

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Clik here to view.Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to local organizations and research projects in Baltimore that study sound, both as a gambit for Sound Studies scholars at ASA to think about how to foster relationships with site-specific colleagues and professionals at this and future meetings, but also as a way of introduction (or a welcome back) to the city that we will live in and be a part of for a few precious days this week.  Here are links to the Baltimore Soundscape Project, an interactive, collective soundmap facilitated by the private nonprofit group The Hearing and Speech Agency, which began in Baltimore in 1926 and functions as a “direct service provider, information resource center, and advocate for people of all ages and incomes who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech-language disabilities”; Baltimore Sounds, a website run by Joe Vaccarino, a local musician, writer, and restaurateur,  “dedicated to the history of past and present pop musicians throughout the Baltimore regional area” that features an extensive “Big List” of all musicians and groups in the area between 1950 and 2000; and the enjoyable Sounds of the Baltimore Oriole for a ornithological taste of “wild” Baltimore beyond the built environment. Take a good listen and I’ll see you all very soon. For the virtual experience, look for my live tweets via our Facebook and Twitter pages or on the official ASA backchannel: #2011asa.

—

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. 

Jump to THURSDAY, October 20
Jump to FRIDAY, October 21
Jump to SATURDAY, October 22
Jump to SUNDAY, October 23

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Baltimore Sounds

THURSDAY, October, 20

THURSDAY PANELS

2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

African American Soundscapes and Sound Theory, Hilton Baltimore Tubman B

CHAIR: Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University (IL)

PAPERS: Anthony Reed, Yale University (CT), “Some Echo of Haunting Melody”: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Musical Modernity

Noelle Morrissette, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (NC), James Weldon Johnson’s Soundscape of Modernity: Black Manhattan

Benjamin S. Glaser, Cornell University (NY), “They require(d) of us a song”: Psalm 137 and the Negro Renaissance

Carter Mathes, Rutgers University, Newark (NJ), Narrative Acoustics: “Free” Writing Black Consciousness

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Towards a Sensual Politics: Nation, Race, and Sense Perception, Hilton Baltimore Peale B

CHAIR: Todd Carmody, University of California, Berkeley (CA)

PAPERS: Britt Rusert, Temple University (PA), Fugitive Senses: Race and Empiricism in the Early Republic

Erica Fretwell, Duke University (NC), Sensitive Citizenship, Passing, and Other Nervous Conditions

Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago (IL), How Videogames Think

COMMENT: Nihad Farooq, Georgia Institute of Technology (GA)

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Folk, Pop, and Indie Rock: Race and Ethnicity in American Music, Hilton Baltimore Carroll B

CHAIR: Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)

PAPERS: Lorena Alvarado, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), Ambiguous Anthems: Narratives of the Immigrant Subject and Popular Music

Nicholas Francisco Centino, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA), Raza Rockabilly: Reclaimed Space, History, and Identity in Contemporary Los Angeles

Matthew Mace Barbee, Siena Heights University (MI), The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence: How Black Nationalism Created Indie Rock

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Voicing a Riff: The Village Voice Music Section and Its Critical Legacy, Hilton Baltimore Johnson B

CHAIR: Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (AL)

PANELISTS: Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis (CA), Ann Powers, Independent Scholar, Greg Tate, Independent Scholar, Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (AL)

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Nijah N. Cunningham, Columbia University (NY), Strident Light, Radiant Sound: Reparation and Redress in a Flyer for a Forsaken Life, Reparative Justice and the Failures of Government, Hilton Baltimore Brent

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Patricia Herrera, University of Richmond (VA), Sonic Memorials to Roberto Clemente, The Nuyorican Movement, Aesthetics, and Feminism, Hilton Baltimore Peale B

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Invisible Sound Studio in Baltimore

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FRIDAY, October 21

FRIDAY PANELS

10:00 am – 11:45 am

Performative Black Christianity and the Logics of Religious Representation, Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 4

CHAIR: Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University (NJ)

PAPERS: Ashon T. Crawley, Duke University (NC), Arthur, Crunch, and the Sound of Blackness in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head

Ronald Neal, Wake Forest University (NC), Spike Lee Can Go to Hell! Tyler Perry, Religion, and Southern Masculinity

Terrion L. Williamson, Michigan State University (MI), Juanita Bynum: Black Religiosity and the Making of a Good Christian Girl

COMMENT: Fred Moten, Duke University (NC)

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Affective Histories, Critical Transformations: A Roundtable Discussion, Hilton Baltimore Latrobe

CHAIR: Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University, New Brunswick/Piscataway (NJ)

PANELISTS: Mel Y. Chen, University of California, Berkeley (CA), Dana Luciano, Georgetown University (DC), Robert McRuer, George Washington University (DC), Karen Tongson, University of Southern California (CA)

ASA Committee on Ethnic Studies I: Sounding Race, Hilton Baltimore Peale B

CHAIR: Herman S. Gray, University of California, Santa Cruz (CA)

PANELISTS: Deborah R. Vargas, University of California, Irvine (CA), Kirstie A. Dorr, University of California, San Diego (CA), Kevin Fellezs, Columbia University (NY), Dolores InÈs Casillas, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA), Herman S. Gray, University of California, Santa Cruz (CA)

12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Musical Migrations, Political Transformations: Reassembling Caribbean Musics in the Post-War United States, Hilton Baltimore Johnson B

CHAIR:  Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University (NY)

PAPERS: Alexandra Vazquez, Princeton University (NJ), Listening in the Cold War Years

Nadia Ellis, University of California, Berkeley (CA), From a Broken Bottle, Traces: Haunt and the Poetics of Diasporic Repair

Shane Vogel, Indiana University–Bloomington (IN), Madam Zajj and U.S. Steel: Duke Ellington’s Calypso Theatre

COMMENT:  Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University (NY)

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Transforming Scholarly Research in the Digital Age (Sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus), Hilton Baltimore Key Ballroom 09

CHAIR:  Wendy Chun, Brown University (RI)

PANELISTS: A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester (NY), Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, University of Pennsylvania (PA), Tara McPherson, University of Southern California (CA), Mark Williams, Dartmouth College (NH)

2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

The Musical Imaginary: Race, Class, and Authenticity, Hilton Baltimore Paca A

CHAIR:  Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Pennsylvania State University, University Park Main Campus (PA)

PAPERS: William Fulton, City University of New York, Graduate School (NY), Re-inventing Authenticity: Big Brother and the  Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills as Haight-Ashbury Counterculture Statement

Sonnet Retman, University of Washington, Seattle (WA), Muddy the Waters: Other Stories of Love and Theft in the Making of the Delta Blues

Elizabeth Yeager, University of Kansas (KS), “Find[ing] myself a city to live in”: Middle Class American Imagination and Phish Scene Identity

Jack Hamilton, Harvard University (MA), Being Good Isn’t Always Easy: Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and Janis Joplin in the 1960s

COMMENT:  Danielle Heard, University of California, Davis (CA)

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

 2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

Daylanne English, Macalester College (MN), ArchAndroids and Their Antecedents: The Roots of Janelle Monae’s Afrofuturistic Post-human, Afrofuturism, Hilton Baltimore Peale A

 4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Marisol Negron, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA), From Mambo to Hip Hop: (Re)Imagining ìNuyoricanî with HÈctor LaVoe and La Bruja, Imagining Latinidad and Citizenship in Popular Cultures, Hilton Baltimore Brent

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THE SOUND GARDEN RECORD STORE, FELLS POINT, BALTIMORE MD, FLICKR USER EARL

EVENTS

9:30 p.m.

Book Release Party for Karen Tongson (USC): Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), 9:30 p.m. at Red Maple, 930 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, 21201

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Saturday, October 22

SATURDAY PANELS

8:00 am – 9:45 am

American Quarterly Theme Session I: Sound in American Studies, Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 5

CHAIR:  Josh Kun, University of Southern California (CA)

PANELISTS: Kara Keeling, University of Southern California (CA), Asma Naeem, University of Maryland, College Park (MD), Dustin Tahmahkera, Southwestern University (TX), Roshanak Kheshti, University of California, San Diego (CA)

**Other scholars appearing in the issue are invited to attend and participate. Confirmed attendance as of this posting: Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, SUNY Binghamton (NY), Gayle Wald, George Washington University (DC)

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Sounds of Response in the Age of Communicative Capitalism, Hilton Baltimore Key Ballroom 07

CHAIR: Travis Jackson, University of Chicago (IL)

PAPERS: Ruby Tapia, Ohio State University, Columbus (OH), Sonic Architectures of Memory: Digital Re-mixes and Structured Mournings at the Virtual WTC

Barry Shank, Ohio State University, Columbus (OH), Imagination and Transformation in Alarm Will Sound’s 1969

Shana Redmond, University of Southern California (CA), Manifold Music: On Markets and the Limits of Racial Exchange

COMMENT: Travis Jackson, University of Chicago (IL)

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Automation or Imagination? Aesthetics and Politics in the History of Electrical Communication, Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 4

CHAIR:  Patricia Ticineto Clough, City University of New York, Queens College (NY)

PAPERS: Mara Mills, New York University (NY), The Politics of Reading Machines, 1912–1971

Drew Daniel, Johns Hopkins University (MD), What Is a Digital Sound Object?

Tara Rodgers, University of Maryland, College Park (MD), The Liveliness of Synthesized Sound: From Helmholtz and Darwin to the Cybernetic Imagination

Orit Halpern, New School University (NY), The Autonomous Eye: Cybernetics, Perception, and Bio-politics

COMMENT:  Patricia Ticineto Clough, City University of New York, Queens College (NY)

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10:00 am – 11:45 am

Musical Lives and Imaginaries in B’More and the Chocolate City, Hilton Baltimore Carroll B

CHAIR:  Lester Kenyatta Spence, Johns Hopkins University (MD)

PAPERS: Natalie Hopkinson, Independent Scholar, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City

Al Shipley, Independent Scholar, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music

Gavin Mueller, George Mason University (VA), The Ecology of Go-Go’s Informal Markets

COMMENT:  Lester Kenyatta Spence, Johns Hopkins University (MD)

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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

ASA Women’s Committee: Digital Displays: Women Imagining Blogospheres as Alternative Public Spheres, Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 4

CHAIR:  Nicole Hodges Persley, University of Kansas (KS)

PAPERS: Tanya Golash-Boza, University of Kansas (KS), How Academics Can Benefit from Blogging and How to Get Started

Judy Lubin, Howard University (DC), Reframing Shirley Sherrod: Black Women Bloggers and the Intersection of Race, Class and Gender

Jamie Schmidt Wagman, Saint Louis University (MO), A Woman’s Sphere: The Pill, The Net, and What’s Next

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, State University of New York, Binghamton (NY), Sounding off about Sounding Out!: Emerging Scholars in an Emerging Field

COMMENT:  Nicole Hodges Persley, University of Kansas (KS)

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4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Transforming Sound(s): A Reading and Discussion, Hilton Baltimore Tubman B

CHAIR:  Jonathan Peter Moore, Duke University (NC)

PANELISTS: Mark McMorris, Georgetown University (DC), Nathaniel Mackey, Duke University (NC), Evie Shockley, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (NJ)

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

8:00 am – 9:45 am

Allison Perlman, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJ),  Regulating the Color Line: Univision, Spanish Language Broadcasting, and Latino Speech Rights, Regulation, Citizenship, and Communication Technologies,Hilton Baltimore Armistead

10:00 am – 11:45 am

Jason William Loviglio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (MD), Radio Free Baltimore: Neoliberal Transformation on the Local Public Airwaves, Behind The Wire, Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 6

Fran McDonald, Duke University (NC), Supreme Laughter: The Reparative Function of Laughter in the American Courtroom, Humor Studies Caucus: Humor as Reparation and Representation, Hilton Baltimore Key Ballroom 09

Lerone Martin, Eden Theological Seminary (MO), Play It Again!: The Phonograph and the Re-imagination, Reparation, and Transformation of Black Protestantism, 1925–1941, The Arts of African American Faith: Social Transformation and the Black Religious Imagination, Hilton Baltimore Peale B

12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Felicidad Bliss Cua Lim, University of California, Irvine (CA), Audible/Visible: Racialized Stardom and Language in Philippine Cinema, American Quarterly Theme Session III: Visuality and Race, Hilton Baltimore Holiday Ballroom 5

2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

Clare Corbould, Monash University, Australia, Performance and the Oral History of Slavery: The WPA Ex-Slave Narratives of the Interwar Years, Imagined Spaces and Reparative Performances: Constructing Public Memory in the Americas, Hilton Baltimore Johnson B

James Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution, Hark the Noisy Streets: The Nineteenth-Century Sounds of Baltimore, The City and Its Spaces, Hilton Baltimore Peale C

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Hishaam Aidi, Columbia University (NY), Hip Hop, Public Diplomacy and Indigenous Islam, Islamophobia: 10 Years after September 11, 2001, Hilton Baltimore Johnson A

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EVENTS

8:00 am – 9:45 am

Business Meeting of the Science and Technology Caucus, Hilton Baltimore Chase

12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Business Meeting of the Digital Humanities Caucus, Hilton Baltimore Stone

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

Business Meeting of the ASA Women’s Committee, Hilton Baltimore Chase

4:00-6:00 p.m.

ASA Sound Studies Caucus Meeting, Pratt Street Ale House, 206. W. Pratt Street, Baltimore, 21201

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SUNDAY, October, 23

SUNDAY PANELS

10:00 am – 11:45 am

The Golden Years: Fifties TV and Radio, Hilton Baltimore Key Ballroom 07

CHAIR:  Candace Moore, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)

PAPERS: Benjamin Min Han, New York University (NY), Cold War Talent: Ethnic Performers, Music, and Variety Shows in 50s America

Susan Murray, New York University (NY), Colortown: NBC’s Investment in Color, 1950–1959

Christina Abreu, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI), From the Bronx to I Love Lucy: Lived and Televised Latinidad at the Tropicana Club in the 1950s

Patrick Roberts, National-Louis University (IL), Soul Machine: Agency and the Art of the Gimmick on Chicago R&B Radio, 1955–1963

COMMENT:  Joel Dinerstein, Tulane University (LA)

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Reparative Warhol, Hilton Baltimore Peale A

CHAIR:  Eric Lott, University of Virginia (VA)

PAPERS: Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University (MI), Liking and Likeness: Across the Color Line in Warhol

Homay King, Bryn Mawr College (PA), Moving On: Andy Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable

Gustavus Stadler, Haverford College in Pennsylvania (PA), Andy’s Wife: Fidelity and Faith in Warhol’s Aural Practices

COMMENT:  Eric Lott, University of Virginia (VA)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

10:00 am – 11:45 am

Albert Sergio Laguna, Columbia College (IL), Listening to Change: Radio, Humor, and the Future of Cuban Miami, Humor Studies Caucus: Ethnic Humor: Pleasures and Problems, Hilton Baltimore Key Ballroom 10

10:00 am – 11:45 am

Grace Wang, University of California, Davis (CA), Tiger Moms and Music Moms: On “Asian” Parenting; and Tamar Barzel, Wellesley College (MA), …pater le Punkeoisie—No Wave’s Queer and Jewish Interventions into Punk Rock’s Semiotic Terrain, Disciplining Gendered Bodies: The Strategic Performance of Ethnic Identity in Musical, Literary, and Visual Culture, Hilton Baltimore Peale C

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VISUALIZING THE BALTIMORE SOUND: JASMINE SARP'S SENIOT THESIS, BY FLICKR USER KROOOOOP

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Ticker Tape Parade, New York City Financial District, by Kitty Wallace

Welcome to our 100^th post! It’s me, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Editor-in-Chief, Guest Posts Editor, and Co-Founder of Sounding Out! : The Sound Studies Blog, which has been faithfully “pushing sound studies into the red since 2009.”  Together with Liana Silva, Co-Founder and Managing Editor, and Aaron Trammell, Co-Founder and Multimedia Editor, we thank you for your faithful readership, your enthusiasm, and of course, your likes, shares, retweets, and good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth!! We are going to keep serving up sound studies’ latest and greatest for a long time to come, for anyone who wants to listen.  Keep a look out for our site redesign coming in January 2012: same good stuff, just that much easier on the eyes.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I am going to get all “meta-“ on you and take you behind the scenes of Sounding Out!,  sharing some of the reasons why we decided to start a public conversation about sound studies on the Internet.  A manifesto of sorts, this post is adapted from a talk I gave a few weeks back at the American Studies Association annual meeting in Baltimore as part of an excellent panel called “Digital Displays: Women Imagining The Blogosphere as Alternative Public Spheres,” sponsored by the American Studies Women’s Committee, organized by Nicole Hodges Persley (University of Kansas) and featuring the excellent work of Tanya Golash-Bolaza, Judy Lubin, and Jamie Schmidt Wagman.

With all that has happened in the short time that has passed since mid-October—especially at #Occupy sites across the country and around the world—I am only more convinced of the need to empower ourselves by building our own microphones, platforms, and audiences, rather than wait for “official” channels to open up; more often than not, they are cut off, nonresponsive, non-existent or just plain hijacked. Without stretching the metaphor too far or confusing what we do with front-line activism—no one is pepper spraying SO!, let’s be real—I’d like to think that the story of  Sounding Out! is also a tale of occupation in its own way.  In that spirit of solidarity and D.I.Y. information exchange, here’s a bit about why I blog. I hope to inspire you to join in the conversation.

(P.S. Check our November 2011 coverage of the acoustics of the #Occupy movement thanks to guest writers Gina Arnold and Ted Sammons)

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In their introduction to the hot-off-the presses special issue of American Quarterly on sound studies—which actually mentions Sounding Out!, on page 451! Yes!—editors Kara Keeling and Josh Kun report receiving an unusual number of submissions from junior faculty members and graduate students, which they describe as “a sign not only of sound’s quantitative currency but the promise of its future as a field of ongoing inquiry, and its importance and relevance to the future of American Studies itself” (452). Keeling and Kun’s editorial openness to newer work is a wonderful exception in traditional academic publishing, where issues of access can loom large for emerging scholars struggling to publish and build a national reputation, particularly for women, scholars of color and/or first-generation scholars, whose expertise in their particular fields is rarely taken for granted.  I use the term access here to refer to breaking into the centers of power on our campuses and/or in our respective fields.  When you are a “nontraditional” scholar frequently isolated at and from your institution, marginalized in your field, and excluded from formal and informal networks of power, all key characteristics cited by Rosabeth Kanter’s influential study of “Tokenism,” gaining a foothold in the increasingly bleak academic landscape can seem insurmountable.

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The Logo of the Women's Audio Mission: Changing the Face of Sound

Because Sound Studies is not yet fully institutionalized—there are beginning to be sound studies masters’ concentrations at a few schools like NYU and the New School, but there are still no “sound studies” departments in the United States—I believe the kind of intervention that I am helping to stage with Sounding Out! is even more important.  Scholars working in audio cultures are spread across, and often isolated in, many fields that are themselves identified as white and male dominated, both in terms of demographics and research agenda: media studies, the history of science and technology, popular music, sound art and design, and film studies, to name a few.  When considered alongside the abysmal numbers of many professional fields for sound practitioners, like video game design, radio announcing, and audio recording—the Women’s Audio Mission reports that 95% of the professional recording industry is currently male—the need is even more clear for two-way channels that increase the access of women and people of color to the central conversations of their industries and academic fields while improving the access of other scholars and wider reading publics to our work.

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Blast from the Pre-Sounding Out! Past: BU Sound Studies Collective Logo Circa 2008

Rather than wait for a platform for our sound studies scholarship to arise, I helped to build a public conversation in a medium that could not only be more responsive to the lightning-paced nature of sound studies’ breakthrough moment, but also one that could be more responded to: open, collaborative, and in conversation with a wide range of interested parties. Way back in 2009, there were few traditional publication venues for research on sound; sound studies scholars had to rely on rare special issues or occasional essays on the margins of various disciplines’ journals. The first print journal primarily devoted to sound launched in Summer 2008, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, but it still left large gaps for those not working in film. Not only did we lack the considerable resources necessary to start a print journal, but the medium wasn’t quite up to our tasks.  A blog seemed much more flexible, able to build a continuously updated, networked, public archive of sound studies scholars, while sustaining what Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes as “an open, post-publication review process [that] is a non-anonymous discussion by a community of scholars working together on collective issues” in her September 30^th, 2011 interview with Inside Higher Ed.

Paul Krugman called such interventions “breaking in from anywhere” in his October 18^th, 2011 blog for the New York Times, “Our Blogs, Ourselves,” arguing that the blogosphere makes academia’s “magic circles” seem “less formal and less defined by where you sit or where you went to school.” Krugman argues blogging has “showed what things are really like. If some famous economists seem to be showing themselves intellectually naked, it’s not really a change in their wardrobe, it’s the fact that it’s easier than it used to be for little boys to get a word in.”  We at Sounding Out! like to think we’re also helping women (little, big, or otherwise) to join this conversation, and more importantly, to change it.

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Clik here to view.While voices like those on Team Sounding Out! are often central to the “ground floor” conversations that shape a new field at conferences, online, and/or at our home institutions, they are often left behind when a field crystallizes in print journal publishing, which, given its limited space and slower-pace, favors the seasoned scholar. Publishing a blog can both complement peer-reviewed research and intervene in its recalcitrant institutional practices.  As Claire Potter, author of the blog Tenured Radical, writes, the blogosphere “works against the stultifying tendency of the academy to keep untenured people in as subservient a state as possible for the longest possible time.”  Sounding Out! enables our untenured but knowledgeable editorial crew to approach the field with agency and gusto, actively seeking out the “ground floor” intellectual labor and innovation happening in sound studies, making it audible and visible in a public forum that is far from ghettoized.  We deliberately curate an integrated, and dynamic collaboration between junior scholars, senior scholars, graduate students, and sound professionals. Thanks to you, we’ll be topping 50,000 hits this week.

Before this all sounds too rosy, I should also be clear that running Sounding Out! is plenty of work, even with a brilliant editorial team. I am constantly surprised at how much time I spend just wrestling with WordPress, let alone the cooler parts of the gig. Not to mention, its role in my tenure case remains to be seen.  However, even when the hours get long (squeezed in on nights and weekends after already impossibly long days and weeks), I will also say that it is work that is deeply satisfying and creative, work that feels both truly my own and yet deeply connected to a worthy collective goal.

I am also thrilled to report that several members of my non-academic family have told me that, thanks to the blog, they “finally understand what the hell it is I do,” which is one of the highest compliments I have received in a long while. As Editor-in-Chief, one of my main missions for Sounding Out! has always been for the blog to become—and remain—a smart, well-written, and informative-yet-irresistible venue for the work of emerging sound studies scholars for academics and non-academics alike. That is ultimately why we work so hard over here at SO!: to share the most vital and important findings of our field in a way that impacts lives as well as careers.

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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

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Clik here to view.Unlike MLA 2011 in Los Angeles, which overflowed with audio-themed research delights–see our last year’s round up here –MLA 2012 in Seattle seems, well, a lot less sonic.  I have a few theories as to why this may be (and of course, I would love to hear your thoughts as to MLA’s relative silence in the comment section. Drop us a line!).  First off, even in our networked universe, conferences always seem to take on some local flavor, so last year’s event in L.A., whose main industry continues to be entertainment, may have been a magnet for panels about music, sound, and other audio-visual inquiries.  Without implying that sound studies is mutually exclusive with Digital Humanities–quite the opposite–perhaps the move to Seattle, long a technology hub thanks to Amazon.com and Microsoft, helps account for the veritable explosion of  DH panels in the PMLA this year.  Being the Editor-in-Chief of a blog, I have included some of the many excellent DH panels in this round up that I think are of interest to fellow research bloggers and sound studies peeps; see Professor (and ProfHacker) Mark Sample’s comprehensive Digital MLA listing on his blog Sample Reality for the full line up (and a great discussion of the growth of digital humanities as a field).

While the sharp decline in overtly labeled “sound studies” panels at MLA seems a bit troubling for a fledgling field, it could also be a backhanded marker of its growing success.  As sound studies grows and expands into more academic venues, this extremely interdisciplinary field is becoming more diffuse and multivalent.  2011 marked the year that the American Studies Association hosted its first official meeting of the sound studies caucus, for example, and published a sound studies special issue of American Quarterly. Three years strong, the Sound Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies hosted a full slate of events and sound studies panels in New Orleans this past March. And the Sound Studies Special Interest Group at the Society for Ethnomusicology meeting this year in Philadelphia, two years old, did the same. Perhaps the time has come for us to coalesce at MLA in a similar way, forming a society with standing meetings and panels to ensure that the nexus of sound studies and literary inquiry continues to break new ground and thrive instead of waxing and waning along with the market and successive conference themes.  Far from being antithetical or ancillary to studies of soundscapes, recordings, and other audible forms, language constructs and shapes our sensory experience of and the meanings we make from “actual” sound; we are only beginning to understand how.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the way in which sound studies research has been absorbed into studies of literature and language is not so much a muting but rather a healthy sign of what audio engineers refer to as “bleed.”  This year’s slate of panels shows how Sound Studies has proven undeniably useful to some of the core issues of the discipline: identity, translation, poetics, affect, tone, and especially voice. With the advent of sound studies, “voice” in literary study has ceased to be a solely a metaphor or an abstract symbol of agency, but panels like “Pinter’s Voice,” “Dissenting Voices,” and “Dickinson’s Fictions of Voice” suggest that the field now hears “voice” as a living, breathing, and sounding entity in its own right, a sensory element of literary craft bearing material traces (and social consequences–see “Gender and Voice: Orality, Dissent, and Community in the Late Middle Ages” and “Arabic Language and Identity: Transregional Texts and Transnational Discourse”).

Finally, I must mention that the MLA’s strength continues to be its international range; sound studies is frequently critiqued for a largely U.S. and British-based focus, so it is refreshing to see sound studies work from (and on) Germany, France, Australia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Ireland, and Iraq (among others) as well as inquiries that question the idea of borders and nation-states altogether.   Whether revivifying the concept of voice or questioning the rhetorical construction of bodies and spaces across the globe, sound studies emerges as a critical mediator between sound and language at MLA 2012, a rich conversation that has really only just begun.

Please comment to let us know what you think–both before and after MLA 2012.  If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: jsa@soundingoutblog.com

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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Jump to THURSDAY, January 5
Jump to FRIDAY, January 6
Jump to SATURDAY, January 7
Jump to SUNDAY, January 8

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THURSDAY, January 5

Thursday, 5 January

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8:30–11:30 a.m.

.1.  Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates

Willow A, Sheraton

Presiding: Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.; Susan Schreibman, Trinity Coll. Dublin

The workshop will provide materials and facilitated discussion about evaluating work in digital media (e.g., scholarly editions, databases, digital mapping projects, born- digital creative or scholarly work). Designed for both creators of digital materials (candidates for tenure and promotion) and administrators or colleagues who evaluate those materials, the workshop will propose strategies for documenting, presenting, and evaluating such work.

Preregistration required.

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1:45–3:00 p.m.

.44.  Pinter’s Voice

303, WSCC

Program arranged by the Harold Pinter Society.  Presiding: Judith A. Roof, Rice Univ.

Saumya Rajan, Univ. of Allahabad, “Ruth: Harold Pinter’s Voice of Postmodernist Politics”

William Crooke, East Tennessee State Univ., “What Dyou Mean? The Cockney Voice in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter,”

Susan Hollis Merritt, Pinter Review, “Pinter’s Voices”

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1:45–3:00 p.m.

67.  Race and Digital Humanities

 611, WSCC

Program arranged by the Division on Black American Literature and Culture. Presiding: Howard Rambsy, Southern Illinois Univ.

Kimberly D. Blockett, Penn State Univ., Brandywine, “Digitizing the Past: The Technologies of Recovering Black Lives”

Bryan Carter, Univ. of Central Missouri, “Digital Africana Studies 3.0: Singularity, Performativity, and Technologizing the Field”

Maryemma Graham, Univ. of Kansas, “The Project on the History of Black Writing and Digital Possibilities”

For abstracts, write to hrambsy@siue.edu.

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3:30–4:45 p.m.

.70.  Multimediated Brecht 

Cedar, Sheraton

Program arranged by the International Brecht Society. Presiding: Kristopher Imbrigotta, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Michael Shane Boyle, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “‘Literarization’ and the Radical Potential of Media”

Julia Draganovic, Modena, Italy, “Brecht’s Radio and Its Italian Legacy”

Michael Ryan, Duke Univ., “Brecht’s Media Theory: A Popular Reassessment”

Respondent: Henning Wrage, Haverford College

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82.  Arabic Language and Identity: Transregional Texts and Transnational Discourses

Columbia, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Karin C. Ryding, Georgetown Univ.

Elizabeth M. Bergman, Miami Univ., Oxford,  “Animating Linguistic Nationalism in Jordan”

Clara Shea, Georgetown Univ., “The Sound of the People: Popular Music and Identity in Lebanon”

Georgette Jabbour, Defense Language Inst., “The Way Forward to Teaching Arabic: Incorporating Dialect with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)”

Emily J. Selove, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “A Baghdadi Party Crasher in Isfahan”

For abstracts, write to rydingk@georgetown.edu

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97.  Voicing Documentary

307, WSCC

Program arranged by the Division on Language and Society. Presiding: James V. Catano, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

Jose Capino, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, “Voice- Over Narration in the Cold War Documentary”

Rebecca Sheehan, Harvard Univ., “The Essay Film and the Ontology of the Epistolary Image: Akerman, Marker, Godard”

James V. Catano, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge, “Voicing Authority: Confessing before God and Errol Morris”

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5:15–6:30 p.m.

115.  Gender and Voice: Orality, Dissent, and Community in the Late Middle Ages

Virginia, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Presiding: Dorothy Kim, Vassar Coll.

Katherine G. Zieman, Univ. of Notre Dame, “Performing Ourselves: Gendering and Voicing in Pater Noster Commentaries”

Nicole Nolan Sidhu, East Carolina Univ., “Gender and the Unruly Female Voice in Piers Plowman“

Dorian Lugo- Bertrán, Univ. of Puerto Rico, ”The Inscription of the Voice and Medieval Materiality in Teresa of Ávila’s Camino de perfección”

Anthony J. Cárdenas- Rotunno, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, ”The Gendered Voices of Leonor López de Córdoba and Teresa de Cartagena”

For abstracts, visit hosted .lib.uiowa .edu/smfs/mff/

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7:00–8:15 p.m.

142.  Affect, Distance, Confession: Emotion and Popular Music

620, WSC

Program arranged by the Division on Popular Culture. Presiding: Sonnet Retman, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

John W. Mowitt, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “(I Can’t Get No) Affect”

Barry Shank, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Approaching Odd Future (OFWGKTA) from a Distant Place”

David R. Shumway, Carnegie Mellon Univ., “‘A Compulsion to Be Honest with My Audience’: Joni Mitchell and Confession”

Respondent: Sonnet Retman

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150.  Digital Humanities and Internet Research

613, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: John Jones, Univ. of Texas, Dallas

Robin A. Reid, Texas A&M Univ., Commerce, “Creating a Conceptual Search Engine and Multimodal Corpus for Humanities Research”

John Jones, Univ. of Texas, Dallas, “What the Digital Can’t Remember”

Jennifer Sano­ Franchini, Michigan State Univ., “Toward a Rhetoric of Collaboration: An Online Resource for Teaching and Learning Re­search”

For abstracts, visit http://robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/

Thursday Individual Papers of Interest 

Mark Deggan, Univ. of British Columbia, “‘Not Bleeding, Singing’:The Operatic Legacy of ’Twixt Land and Sea,” 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 616, WSCC

Emilie Brancato, Univ. of Toronto, “Exploring Marguerite’s Voice in the Middle English Translation of the Mirouer des simples âmes,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., Virginia, Sheraton

Eric J.Hyman, Fayetteville State Univ., “The Filtered Voices of Margery Kempe,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., Virginia, Sheraton

John Melillo, Univ. of Arizona, “Empathic Noise,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., 608, WSCC2.

Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Princeton Univ, “Césaire’s Voice Lessons,” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 618, WSCC

Robert J. Patterson, Georgetown Univ., “She Heard Nothing: Traumatized Cat and the Unsympathetic Listener in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 615, WSCC

Yonsoo Kim, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, “Women’s Voiced Desire and Muted Passions: Teresa de Cartagena and Santa Teresa,” 7:00–8:15 p.m., 620, WSC

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Statue of Jimi Hendrix at the Corner of Pike and Broadway, Seattle, WA by Flickruser bleachers

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Friday, 6 January

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 6
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8:30–9:45 a.m.

166.  Tone in Narrative

617, WSCC

Program arranged by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Presiding: Molly Hite, Cornell Univ.

James Phelan, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Dialogue, Voice, and Tone; or, Exploring a Neglected Channel of Narrative Communication”

Debra Fried, Cornell Univ., “Taking a Wrong Tone”

Chris Rideout, Seattle Univ. School of Law, “Voice, Self, and Tonal Cues in Legal Discourse”

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174.  The Opera Libretto

620, WSCC

Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations. Presiding: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

Edward Anderson, Rice Univ. “Staging Authority—Ariosto, Early Opera, and the Society of Dead Poets”

Matthew Paul Carlson, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “English Verse Translations of Die Zauberlöte: Auden and Kallman versus McClatchy”

Ryan Kangas, Univ. of Houston, “Encountering the Mirror in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ and Der Zwerg”

Douglas Fisher, Florida State Univ., “Willie Stark: Carlisle Floyd’s Libretto Based on William Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men”

For abstracts, visit http://www.lyricasociety.org/

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188.  Jimi Hendrix and the Poetics of Song

611, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Jacob Wilkenfeld, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Jeffrey Carroll, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, “Dancing in Dylan’s Head: Jimi Hendrix and the Folk Tradition”

Daniel Barlow, Univ. of Pittsburgh, “Jimi Hendrix and the Politics of Blackness”

Michael New, Penn State Univ., University Park, “Voodoo Child: Jimi Hendrix and the African American Experimental Tradition”

Jacob Wilkenfeld, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Are You Experienced? Jimi Hendrix and the Poetics of Black Experience”

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10:15–11:30 a.m.

236.  Remixing Present-Day English

306, WSCC

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Present-Day English Language. Presiding: Dulce M. Estevez, Arizona State Univ.

Nils Olov Fors, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania, “A Critical Analysis of Language Use Constructs in Discourses Related to Language Education in South Texas, 2000–10”

Jennifer M. Santos, Virginia Military Inst., “Agog or a Gag? Lady Gaga’s Remixes Remixed”

Dulce M. Estevez, Arizona State Univ., “Mixteando Languages in the United States”

Sarah Catherine Dean, Arizona State Univ., “Remixing English to Represent Trauma and Identity”

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12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.

244.  Dickinson’s Fictions of Voice

303, WSCC

Program arranged by the Emily Dickinson International Society. Presiding: Elizabeth Petrino, Fairield Univ.

Vivian R. Pollak, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, “Dickinson and Sincerity: The Nineteenth-Century Context”

Margaret Rennix, Harvard Univ., “The Speaking Dead: Animated Corpses and National Crisis in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Alfred Tennyson”

Ai’fe Murray, San Francisco, CA, “The Influence of Her Servants’ Ethnic Vernaculars on Emily Dickinson’s Language”

For abstracts, write to epetrino@ fairfield.edu

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245.  Narrativity and Musicality: The Confluence of Language, Literature, and Culture

305, WSCC

Program arranged by the College Language Association. Presiding: Warren Carson, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg

Kameelah Martin Samuel, Georgia State Univ., “Of Blues Narrative and Conjure Magic: A Symbiotic Dialectic in the Fiction of Arthur Flowers and J. J. Phillips”

Dolan Hubbard, Morgan State Univ., “DuBois, Hansberry, and a Knock at Midnight”

Thabiti Lewis, Washington State Univ., Vancouver, “Teaching Hip-Hop and Black Vernacular Tradition While Tackling the Boogie Man”

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249.  Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom

Grand A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens, Univ. of Southern California

Speakers: Kathryn E. Crowther, Georgia Inst. of Tech.; Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Maureen Engel, Univ. of Alberta; Paul Fyfe, Florida State Univ.; Kathi Inman Berens; Janelle A. Jenstad, Univ. of Victoria; Charlotte Nunes, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Heather Zwicker, Univ. of Alberta

This electronic roundtable assumes that “building stuff” is foundational to the digital humanities and that the technical barriers to participation can be low. When teaching undergraduates digital humanities, simple tools allow students to focus on the simultaneous practices of building and interpreting. This show-and-tell presents projects of variable technical complexity that foster robust interpretation.

For abstracts, visit briancroxall.net/buildingDH

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259.  Representation in the Shadow of New Media Technologies

304, WSCC

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada. Presiding: Lan Dong, Univ. of Illinois, Springield

Aymar Jean Christian, Univ. of Pennsylvania, “Web Video and Ethnic Media: Linking Representation and Distribution”

Daniel Greene, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “Among Friends: Comparing Social Networking Functions in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Afro-American in 1904 and 1933″

Lisa Nakamura, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, “Digital Trash Talk: The Rhetoric of Instrumental Racism as Procedural Strategy”

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273.  Queer Performance: Space, Bodies, and Movement(s)

620, WSCC

Program arranged by the GL/Q Caucus for the Modern Languages. Presiding: Francesca Therese Royster, DePaul Univ.

Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Univ. of Iowa“Race-ing Time through Queer Xicana Performance”

Robert McRuer, George Washington Univ., “Crip Out: Freakish Performance and the Rogue Queer History”

Sharon Bridgforth, DePaul Univ., “Ring or Shout”

For abstracts, write to ltorres@ depaul.edu.

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1:45–3:00 p.m.

283.  What Makes Language Literary?

Metropolitan A, Sheraton

A linked session arranged in conjunction with The Presidential Forum: Language, Literature, Learning (202). Presiding: Sabine Wilke, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Speakers: Charles Francis Altieri, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Daniel Dooghan, Univ. of Tampa; Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins Univ., MD; Alexander C. Y. Huang, George Washington Univ.

This roundtable asks whether the familiar pairing “language and literature” is more than just an academic convention. Is literature a necessary function of language, or is language merely the vehicle with which literature pursues its own ends? At stake are questions of rhetoric and criticism, poetic language, the standing of translation, and the tensions between historical experience and aesthetic autonomy.

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294.  Humor and Subversion: Approaches to Pacific Literature and Orature at the Universities of Hawai‘i and Guam

 608, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Caroline Sinavaiana, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa

Caroline Sinavaiana, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, “bro’Town and he Naked Samoans: Ritual Clowning Goes Prime Time”

Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Manoa, “Mokes with Jokes: Nah Nah Nah Nah—‘Bussing Laugh’ as Colonial Resistance”

Nicholas J. Goetzfridt, Univ. of Guam, “The Illusions of Betrayal: Mudrooroo, Indigenousness, and the Stage I Make”

Brandy Nalani McDougall, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, “Anticolonial Humor and Poetic Resistance in the American Colonies of the Pacific”

Respondent: Craig Perez, Univ. of California, Berkeley

For abstracts, write to sinavaia@hawaii.edu

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298.  Reading across Media

Aspen, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century German Literature. Presiding: Deniz Göktürk, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Lutz Koepnick, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, “Reading on the Move”

Heather Love, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, “Fighting Stupidity and Playing Music: Musil, Adorno, and the Performativity of Interpretation”

Daniel Gilillan, Arizona State Univ., “Literature on the Radio: Sound and the Intermedial Modulation of Knowledge”

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307.  Theorizing Hip- Hop: New Approaches to Hip-Hop as Intellectual Production

618, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Jill Richardson, Borough of Manhattan Community Coll., City Univ. of New York

Shante Paradigm Smalls, Davidson Coll., “Queer Hip-Hop Diasporas: A History”

James Ford, Occidental Coll., “The Shadows of Tomorrow: Hip- Hop, Madlib, and the Archive”

Michael Ralph, New York Univ., “Hip- Hop Is Not What You Think It Is”

Jill Richardson, Borough of Manhattan Community Coll., City Univ. of New York, “Performing Male Desire: The Intersection of Hip- Hop and Drug Culture”

For abstracts, write to jilltrichardson@msn.com

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3:30–4:45 p.m.

325.  Ireland and the Politics of Language

304, WSCC

Program arranged by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Presiding: Richard Russell, Baylor Univ.

Laura B. O’Connor, Univ. of California, Irvine, “Muse Energy: Releasing and Reinscribing the Spéirbhean”

Spurgeon W. Thompson, Kaplan International Colls., “‘English Is Dead’: Assassinating English in Finnegans Wake”

Kelly Matthews, Framingham State Univ., “‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew You!’: Sean O’Faolain, the Gaelic League, and Debates over Language and Literature in the Mid- Twentieth Century”

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332.  Digital Narratives and Gaming for Teaching Language and Literature

Aspen, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Presiding: Barbara Laford, Arizona State Univ.

Steven Thorne, Portland State Univ., “Narrative Expression and Scientific Method in Online Gaming Worlds”

Jonathon Reinhardt, Univ. of Arizona; Julie Sykes, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, “Designing Narratives: A Framework for Digital Game- Mediated L2 Literacies Development”

Edmond Chang, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Timothy Welsh, Loyola Univ., New Orleans, “Close Playing, Paired Playing: A Practicum”

Respondent: Dave McAlpine, Univ. of Arkansas, Little Rock

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5:15–6:30 p.m.

.349.  Digital Pedagogy

Grand A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Katherine D. Harris, San José State Univ.

Speakers: Sheila T. Cavanagh, Emory Univ.; Elizabeth Chang, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia; Lori A. Emerson, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder; Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey; John Lennon, Univ. of South Florida Polytechnic; Kevin Quarmby, Shakespeare’s Globe Trust; Katherine Singer, Mount Holyoke Coll.; Roger Whitson, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

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Friday Individual Papers of Interest

Kimberly Wedeven Segall, Seattle Pacific Univ., “Heteroglossic Iraq: Voices of Women and War,” 8:30–9:45 a.m., 303, WSCC

Imani Perry, Princeton Univ., “Of Degraded Tongues and Digital Talk: Race and the Politics of Language,” 10:15 a.m.–12:00 noon, Metropolitan A, Sheraton

Emily M. Harrington, Penn State Univ., University Park, “Lyric and Music at the Fin de Siècle: The Cultural Place of Song,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., 611, WSCC

James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colls., “Of Moan and Stutter: M. Nourbese Philips’s Hauntological Zong!” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 614, WSCC

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The Experience Music Project, Seattle photo by Flickr user Brad Coy

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Saturday, January 7

Saturday, 7 January

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10:15–11:30 a.m.

450.  Digital Faulkner: William Faulkner and Digital Humanities

 615, WSCC

Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society. Presiding: Steven Knepper, Univ. of Virginia

Speakers: Keith Goldsmith, Vintage Books; John B. Padgett, Brevard Coll.; Noel Earl Polk, Mississippi State Univ.; Stephen Railton, Univ. of Virginia; Peter Stoichef, Univ. of Saskatchewan

A roundtable on digital humanities and its implications for teaching and scholarship on the work of William Faulkner.

For abstracts, visit faulknersociety .com/ panels.htm 

Discussions about digital projects and digital tools often focus on research goals. For this electronic roundtable, we will instead demonstrate how these digital resources, tools, and projects have been integrated into undergraduate and graduate curricula.

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12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.

468.  Networks, Maps, and Words: Digital-Humanities Approaches to the Archive of American Slavery

615, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Lauren Klein, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

Lauren Klein, Georgia Inst. of Tech.,“‘A Report Has Come Here’: Social-Network Analysis in the Papers of Thomas Jefferson”

Cameron Blevins, Stanford Univ., “Slave Narratives in Space: Mapping the World of Venture Smith”

Aditi Muralidharan, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Using Digital Tools to Explore Narrative Conventions in the North American Antebellum Slave Narratives”

Respondent: Amy Earhart, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

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477.  Postnational Readings of the Audiovisual

Aspen, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century German Literature and the Division on Film. Presiding: Nora M. Alter, Temple Univ.,Philadelphia; Deniz Göktürk, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Kalani Michell, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities,“Sounds of the Berlin School”

Ian Thomas Fleishman, Harvard Univ., “International ‘Auditorism’: The Postnational Politics of Reading of von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others”

Jaimey Fisher, Univ. of California, Davis, “Surveying the Border Crossing: Terrorist Films and the Postnational Imaginary”

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479.  Digital Humanities in the Italian Context

Cedar, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Manuela Marchesini, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

Stefano Franchi, Texas A&M Univ., College Station, “Digital Humanities in the Italian Culture Landscape”

Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M Univ., College Station, “Life and the Digital: On Esposito and Tarizzo’s Inventions of Life”

Massimo Lollini, Univ. of Oregon “Humanist Studies and the Digital Age”

Silvia Stoyanova, Princeton Univ., “Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone: From Card Index to Hypertext”

For abstracts, write to mmarchesini@tamu.edu

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484.  Dissenting Voices

Columbia, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on ArabicLiterature and Culture. Presiding: Anouar Majid, Univ. of New England

Ibtissam Bouachrine, Smith Coll., “Why Moroccan Women Rebel”

Nouri Gana, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “Hip- Hop Insurgency”

Olivier Bourderionnet, Univ. of New Orleans, “Building Bridges with Songs: Amazigh Kateb and Abd al-Malik”

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499.  Literary Multilingualism and Exile in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Ravenna C, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Salvatore Pappalardo, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

Celine Piser, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Multilingualism and the Construction of a Hy­brid Identity in Twentieth­ Century Judeo­ French Lit­erature”

Hassan Melehy, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Jack Kerouac’s Translingual Exile”

Maria Kager, Rut­gers Univ., New Brunswick, “Ahksent on Last Syllable: Mispronunciation in Nabokov’s American Novels”

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1:45–3:00 p.m.

506.  Voice and Identity in Australian Literature

 616, WSCC

Program arranged by the American Association of Australian Literary Studies. Presiding: Nathanael O’Reilly, Texas Christian Univ.

Jennifer McGovern, Univ. of Iowa, “Death by Torture in the Country of the Mind: Metaphors of Captivity and Freedom in Patrick White’s Voss (1957)”

Sarah Chihaya, Univ. of California, Berkeley, ”The Un-death of Maggs: The Returned Convict as Revenant in Jack Maggs”

Nicholas Dunlop, Univ. of Birmingham, “Suburban Space and Multicultural Identities in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap”

Nathanael O’Reilly, Texas Christian Univ., “Rejecting Suburban Identity in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack“

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522.  The Seattle Sound

618, WSCC

Program arranged by the Division on Popular Culture. Presiding: Hillary L. Chute, Univ. of Chicago

Lindsay E. Waters, Harvard Univ. Press, “Theory Alone Nothing; Theory plus Dancing Change the World: The Seattle Sound of Sleater-Kinney and Hendrix”

John Melillo, New York Univ., “Nirvana: Noise and Empathy”

John McCombe, Univ. of Dayton, “Virginia Woolf in the Trailer Park: Isaac Brock; Nowhere, WA; and the Lonesome, Crowded West”

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3:30–4:45 p.m.

539.  # alt- ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities

3B, WSCC

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Computer Studies in Language and Literature. Presiding: Sara Steger, Univ. of Georgia

Speakers: Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Julia H. Flanders, Brown Univ.; Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education; Matthew Jockers, Stanford Univ.; Shana Kimball, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia; Lisa Spiro, National Inst. for Tech. in Liberal Education

This roundtable brings together various perspectives on alternative academic careers from professionals in digital humanities centers, libraries, publishing, and humanities labs. Speakers will discuss how and whether digital humanities is especially suited to fostering non-tenure- track positions and how that translates to the role of alt-ac in digital humanities and the academy. Related session: “# alt- ac: he Future of ‘Alternative Academic’ Careers” (595).

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5:15–6:30 p.m.

581.  Digital Humanities versus New Media

611, WSCC

Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll., “Everything Old Is New Again: The Digital Past and the Humanistic Future”

Andrew Pilsch, Penn State Univ., University Park, “As Study or as Paradigm? Humanities and the Uptake of Emerging Technologies”

David Robert Gruber, North Carolina State Univ., “Digital Tunnel Vision: Deining a Rhetorical Situation”

Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ., “Digital Humanities Authorship as the Object of New Media Studies”

For abstracts, visit www .duke .edu/ ~ves4/mla201

Saturday Individual Papers of Interest

Erich Nunn, Auburn Univ., Auburn, “Music, Race, and Nation in Johnson’s Autobiography,” 1:45–3:00 p.m., 307, WSCC

Leslie Petty, Rhodes Coll., “‘Every Woman . . . Should Raise Her Voice’: Rethinking White Women’s Activism in William Wells Brown’s Clotel,” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 307, WSCC

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Flyer for a Seattle Phonographers Union Performance, For information on the artists' collective see http://www.seapho.org/

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SUNDAY, January 8

Sunday, 8 January

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8:30–9:45 a.m.

638.  Gettin’ Around: Transnational Jazz Literature

618, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Jürgen E. Grandt, Gainesville State Coll., GA

Rashida Braggs, Williams Coll., “From Harlem to Paris: A Transatlantic Interpretation of James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’”

Marc-Oliver Schuster, Univ. of Vienna, “Swinging Variety: Jazz in the Literature of the German Democratic Republic”

Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Penn State Univ., University Park, ”The Transplanetary Nation Blues and the Abstract Truth”

Respondent: DoVeanna Sherie Fulton Minor, Univ. of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

For abstracts, write to jgrandt@gsc.edu.

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10:15–11:30 a.m.

664.  Sound and Voice in the Creative Writing Classroom: Practice-Based Pedagogies

614, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Christopher Drew, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

David Bartone, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Avoiding Meaning: A Classroom Exercise to Improve Students’ Homophonic Sensibilities”

David Yost, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee“Into the Trenches: Breaking the Student-Author Binary with ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’”

Liane LeMaster, Georgia Perimeter Coll., North Campus, “Speciicity of Dialogue: A Coke Is a Soda Is a Pop Is a Cola”

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665.  Debates in the Digital Humanities

615, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Alexander Reid, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York

Matthew K. Gold, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York, “Whose Revolution? Toward a More Equitable Digital Humanities”

Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego, “Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University”

Jeff Rice, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia, ”Twenty-First- Century Literacy: Searching the Story of Billy the Kid”

Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria, “Why the Digital Humanities Needs Theory”

For abstracts and discussion, visit dhdebatesmla12.wordpress.com.

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12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.

691.  Gertrude Stein and Music

Cedar, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations and the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism. Presiding: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

Tanya E. Clement, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “Sounding Stein’s Texts by Using Digital Tools for Distant Listening”

Judith A. Roof, Rice Univ., “Gertrude’s Glee and Jazz Mislaid Jazz”

Brandon Masterman,Univ. of Pittsburgh, “‘This Is How hey Do Not Like It’: Queer Abjection in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts”

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716.  Digital Material

613, WSCC

A special session. Presiding: Charles M. Tung, Seattle Univ.; Benjamin Widiss, Princeton Univ.

Speakers: Paul Benzon, Temple Univ., Philadelphia; Cara Elisabeth Ogburn, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Charles M. Tung; Benjamin Widiss; Zachary Zimmer, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.

Is there gravity in digital worlds? Moving beyond both lamentations and celebrations of the putatively free- loating informatic empyrean, this roundtable will explore the ways in which representations in myriad digital platforms—verbal, visual, musical, cinematic—might bear the weight of materiality, presence, and history and the ways in which bodies—both human and hardware—might be recruited for or implicated in the efort.

For abstracts, write to bwidiss@princeton.edu
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1:45–3:00 p.m

736.  Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies

University, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Mark L. Sample, George Mason Univ.

Speakers: Edmond Chang, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Steven E. Jones, Loyola Univ., Chicago; Jason C. Rhody, National Endowment for the Humanities; Anastasia Salter, Univ. of Baltimore; Timothy Welsh, Loyola Univ., New Orleans; Zach Whalen, Univ. of Mary Washington

This roundtable moves beyond the games-versus-stories dichotomy to explore the full range of possible literary approaches to video games. These approaches include the theoretical and methodological contributions of reception studies, reader-response theory, narrative theory, critical race and gender theory, disability studies, and textual scholarship.

For abstracts, visit www .samplereality .com/ mla12.

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Sunday Individual Papers of Interest

Toni Wall Jaudon, Ithaca Coll., “Sound and Separateness: The Hindu Widow’s Cries in Early-Nineteenth-Century United States Print Culture,” 1:45–3:00 p.m., 304, WSCC

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Grunge: One of Seattle's Signature Sounds, Photo by Flickr User Sands

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I cannot tell you how utterly bummed I am that the Experience Music Project/IASPM joint POP conference falls on exactly the same weekend as the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies meeting in Boston. A lot of scholars, the editorial board of Sounding Out! included, have been forced to make the excruciating choice between them, or—as, the newly nomadic EMP POP will be hosted in New York City this year—to crisscross the Eastern seaboard with heroic train, bus, and car jaunts in an attempt to make both meetings at once.  The good folks here at SO! will be doing our utmost to make the best out of a bad situation; in addition to my SCMS offering, look for Liana Silva’s bonus EMP conference preview round-up post this Wednesday and our dueling live tweets from both joints (a little love for those unable or unwilling to go on tour). Our Twitter handle is @soundingoutblog

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Clik here to view.Given the huge crossover audience between the EMP/IASMP and the SCMS, I do think this planning snafu brings unfortunate consequences for both meetings, most noticeably a large dip in sound work at this year’s SCMS, including the massive downturn of scholarship on popular music.  The dearth is a real disappointment considering how hard-fought its place has historically been in the organization (see Norma Coates’ 2008 Cinema Journal piece, “Sound Studies: Missing the (Popular) Music for the Screens?” for a compelling story of the institutional turf wars between sound studies, media studies, and popular music study writ large) as well as the fact that 2011’s SCMS New Orleans meeting positively brimmed with music and sound.  Not to mention that this year’s Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting, helmed by Co-Chairs Norma Coates and Tim Anderson on Wednesday March 21 from 2:00-3:45, is more music-oriented than it has been in the past, featuring guest speaker Charles McEnerney, who has been the Host + Producer of Well-Rounded Radio, a music interview audio podcast series (more details below). I am excited that the SSSIG is working to bridge popular music study with an exploration of “new media sound” and its possibilities, and not solely because Sounding Out! hosts a podcast series of its own.   Unfortunately, one of the few music panels at SCMS is scheduled at the same time as the Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting—and it is the panel of co-chair Anderson!!—another scheduling bummer.

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Something Old, Something New, Radios by Flickr User woutervddn

Rather than dwelling on bad news, however, I want to amplify some of the unanticipated positive effects of the confluence of conferences this weekend, especially the dramatic upswing in research on radio and video game studies this year.  There are seven free-standing radio panels at SCMS 2012 (!!!), featuring an excellent blend of radio’s top scholars and brightest emerging voices that dial in some strikingly fresh conversation about contemporary radio technology and programming (E10: Thursday, March 22, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM), the study of aesthetics in historical radio (D8: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 04:00PM-05:45PM), and transnational sonic exchange, both past and present (L21: Friday, March 23, 2012 02:15PM-04:00PM). We are especially excited to hear the new scholarship from Neil Verma, Shawn VanCour, and Alex Russo, the three radio scholars who Sounding Out! will feature this summer in our upcoming series on the life and legacy of radio innovator Norman Corwin—look for one post each month in June, July, and August 2012.

It is also wonderful for questions regarding sound and video game studies to emerge more prominently at SCMS, especially given their contemporary global cultural influence and the vibrancy of their sound design community, especially in the Twitterverse and via blogs like GameSound.  We are especially excited that Aubrey Anable’s panel on Thursday, March 22, 2012(3:00-4:45) offers us the chance to listen at the intersection of sound studies with the growing scholarship on affect and play, something dear to hearts and minds over here at SO! (see Aaron Trammell’s recent “Orality and Cybernetics in Battleship”).  Especially impressive is how the interventions of videogame scholarship are so fundamentally audio-visual, an articulation that took film studies many years—and even now still seems somewhat reluctant and tenuous. For a list of all video-game panels at SCMS, check theMarch 18th post from Mark Sample’s  Sample Reality.

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The rise of different types of old and new sound media at this year’s SCMS, along with the retrospective roundtable on the pathbreaking scholarship of film sound scholar Rick Altman—featuring fellow heavy hitters Jay Beck, Norma Coates, John Belton, Donald Crafton, Michele Hilmes, Amy Lawrence, and Jonathan Sterne—has made me once again ponder the state of sound studies in film, one of the earliest fields to make the most recent “sonic turn” in scholarship. While certainly there are some innovative, boundary-crossing gems regarding sound and film at SCMS 2012—such as Friday’s “Sonic Approaches to Genre” (12:15-2:00) and Sunday’s “Interwar Sounds” (11:00-12:45), by and large, cinema studies remains overwhelmingly visually oriented as represented at this year’s meeting. Very few panels engage with sound as a primary modality and there are far less individual papers threading sound into panel discussions not explicitly about sound.  We need more of both kinds of scholarly engagement, and perhaps the sudden resurgence of interest around silent film with the Oscar runs of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’s black-and-white silent film The Artist, which won Best Picture, will once again de-naturalize the relationship between film sound and image.  Or, as Altman told us in the introduction to Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992): “In a world where sound is commonly taken as an unproblematic extension of the image, within a comfortably unified text, the concept of multi-discursivity is bound to enfranchise sound, concentrating attention on its ability to carry its own independent discourses” (10).  [By the way, guest writer April Miller, film and cultural studies scholar at the University of Northern Colorado, will be helping us think through the resurgence of silent film next month here at Sounding Out!].

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Speaking of trying to find sound where there doesn’t appear to be any, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my own roundtable on archival dilemmas, “You Are Who, Exactly?”: A Workshop on Working with Non-traditional Scholars,” moved from Wednesday to Saturday afternoon because of scheduling conflict (11:00-12:45, Room TBA in the hard copy SCMS program). A highly interdisciplinary and intermedia panel chaired by Visual Studies scholar Joan Saab, I will be chatting with sound scholar (and CB researcher) Art Blake, cinema scholar Philip Leers, and Media and Animation scholar Nicolas Sammond about the challenges (and breakthroughs) that arise for cultural studies scholars working in areas where, to quote our abstract, “there is no fixed archive nor even a reliable set of sources for our work.”  Some questions we plan to collectively think through include: “Is there an ethics of interpretation that differs from those we use in the [traditional] archive? For those of us working in more ephemeral media (e.g. sound, graffiti, cartoons, everyday life), how do we begin to locate or name our archives, and subsequently how do we acknowledge and catalogue these collections? Where does collaboration begin and end, and where might exploitation and appropriation take over?”  My introductory remarks, “Listening from the Margins: The Problem of Historical Sound” will focus on the challenges I face hunting for sound in visually-oriented archives—a methodology of marginalia, afterthoughts, and seemingly offhand remarks—as well as the difficulties of archival research when sound media matters.  What happens when you are studying the editorial practice of a sound montage artist like Tony Schwartz, for example, as I was for “Splicing the Sonic Color-line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York” (Social Text 102, Spring 2010) but the Library of Congress will only provide access to seamlessly streaming digital reproductions of his work, rather than the painstakingly—and clearly—edited magnetic tape?   While I definitely do not have all the answers, I hope you will join me and my stellar fellow panelists in in discussing solutions to such vexing dilemmas.

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Clik here to view.Ah, dilemmas. One last one.  For all of you Sound Studies heads who aren’t totally exhausted by rushing all over the East Coast for our academic version of  EMP/IASPM/SCMS “March Madness,” I highly recommend Cornell’s Resoundingly Queer conference next weekend—March 30—April 1^st—featuring the work of John Waters, Charles Busch, D.R.E.D., Holly Hughes, Terry Galloway, Moe Angelos, David Savran, Jose Munoz, Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, Ann Pellegrini, Eng Beng Lim, Amy Villarejo, Nick Salvato, Shane Vogel, and Judith Peraino, among others. This groundbreaking event will “explore the utterances, echoes, moans, and groans that animate contemporary studies of sex, gender, and sexuality,” one of the first major conferences do so in such a deep and sustained way.  I’ll be there, exhausted but enthused, and ready to Tweet for our reader-verse. I’m just thankful such excellence does not fall on this already insane weekend. See you in Boston! And New York City! And Ithaca!

Please comment to let SO! know what you think–both before and after SCMS 2012.  If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: jsa@soundingoutblog.com

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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

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Jump to WEDNESDAY, March 21
Jump to THURSDAY, March 22
Jump to FRIDAY, March 23
Jump to SATURDAY, March 24
Jump to SUNDAY, March 25

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WEDNESDAY, March 21

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 10:00AM-11:45PM (Session A)

A12: Music and Media Shifts

Room: Gloucester

Chair: Carol Vernallis (Arizona State University)

Kyle Stevens (University of Pittsburgh), “Singing the Pretty: Woman’s Voices and the Classical Hollywood Musical”

Daniel Bishop (Indiana University), “Sounding the Past in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde”

Andrew Ritchey (University of Iowa), “Moving in Time: Musical Analogy and the Emergence of Avant-Garde Film”

Carol Vernallis (Arizona State University), “What Was, What Is, ‘My MTV’: MTV’s First Broadcast and Music Video Now

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Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 12:00PM-01:45PM (Session B)

B4: 60s Experimental Cinema and Eccentric Embodiment

Room: Board Room

Chair: Juan Suarez (University of Murcia)

Co-Chair: Ara Osterweil (McGill University)

Lucas Hilderbrand (University of California, Irvine), “Sex Out of Sync: Christmas on Earth’s Queer Soundtrack”

Ara Osterweil (McGill University), “Yoko Ono: Philosophy in the Bedroom”

Juan Suarez (University of Murcia), “Film Grain and the Queer Body: Tom Chomont”

Marc Siegel (Goethe University Frankfurt), “The Sound Recordings of Mario Montez

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Wednesday, March 21, 2012 02:00PM-03:45PM (Session C)

***Sound Studies Special Interest Group 2012 Annual Meeting

Room: Stanbro Room on Level 4

Convened by SSSIG Co-Chair Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario), featuring special presentation by Charles McEnerney.

SSSIG Co-Chair Tim Anderson (Old Dominion) is scheduled to present at this time (see session C19 “Rebooting the Music Industry”)

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Charles McEnerney

From the SSSIG’s Correspondence: “Charles is a talented marketer and has worked with clients such as HBO and WGBH. However, he has most recently  worked with the Future of Music Coalition, a national education, research and advocacy organization for musicians based out of Washington D.C. to help them better understand how musicians are actually making money in a new music economy.

Since 2002, Charles McEnerney has been the Host + Producer of Well-Rounded Radio, a music interview audio podcast series that has included a wide range of genres and topics. Ranging from discussions of bluegrass, independent rock, folk, rap, new music industry, music festivals, and so on, the podcast has included interviews with musicians such as Dave Allen (Gang of Four/Shriekback), Ken Irwin (founder of Rounder Records), Lawrence Lessig, Erin McKeown, and Amanda Palmer.

McEnerney is also the ‘instigator’ behind the Musicians for Music 2.0 Venture Fund, an idea to create a new kind of funding organization for music discovery for taste makers and technology start-ups. Music 2.0 is dedicated to building ‘a better music ecosystem.’”

To join the SCMS Sound Studies Special Interest Facebook Group click here. To join the group via the SCMS website click here.

C9: The Culture and Practice of the Sound Image in Japan around 1930

Room: Constitution 

Chair: Michael Raine (Independent Scholar)

Respondent: James Lastra (University of Chicago)

Masaki Daibo (Theatre Museum of Waseda University), “Before Reimei: Early Attempts to Produce Talking Japanese Cinema through the Phonograph”

Michael Raine (Independent Scholar), “‘No Interpreter, Full Volume’: The Benshi and the Sound Image in Early 1930s Japan”

Johan Nordstrom (Waseda University), “The Sound Image in Early Japanese Musicals”

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C17: Audiovisual Archives in the Digital Age

Room: Stanhope

Chair: Katherine Groo (University of Aberdeen)

Jasmijn Van Gorp (Utrecht University), “Unavailable Audiovisual Material, No Research? Improving Data Collection in the Audiovisual Archive”

Nanna Verhoeff (Utrecht University), “Visual Archives on the Move: Locative Media for Digital Heritage”

Katherine Groo (University of Aberdeen), “Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter: Remixing Silent Film (History)

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C19: Rebooting the Music Industry

Room: Thoreau

Chair: David Arditi (George Mason University)

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Women’s Work: Gendering the Music Supervisor, Mainstreaming Indie Culture”

Andrew deWaard (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Cultural Capital Project: Radical Monetization of the Music Industry”

Tim Anderson (Old Dominion University), “From Background Music to Above-the-Line: A System Analysis of the Newfound Importance of the Music Supervisor in Film and Television”

David Arditi (George Mason University), “Digitizing Distribution: The MP3’s Impact on the Album”

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Wednesday, March 21, 2012 04:00PM-05:45PM (Session D)

D4: Terrence Malick, Film Form, and Meaning: Exploring the Last Three Films

 Room: Board Room

Chair: Chuck Maland (University of Tennessee)

Respondent: Walter Metz (Southern Illinois University)

Clint Stivers (University of Tennessee Knoxville), “‘What’s Your Name Kid?’: The Enigmatic Voiceover in The Thin Red Line”

Lloyd Michaels (Allegheny College), “Text, Author, Meaning: Reading the ‘Extended Cut’ of The New World“

Anders Bergstrom (Wilfrid Laurier University), “Voice-Over, Focalization, and the Cinematic Memory Image in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011)”

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D8: The Aesthetic Turn in Radio Studies

Room: Charles River

Chair: Neil Verma (University of Chicago)

Co-Chair: Shawn VanCour (University of South Carolina)

Allison McCracken (DePaul University), “‘Whispers and Pops’: Microphone Singing and the Invention of the Intimate Aesthetic, 1920s”

Shawn VanCour (University of South Carolina), “Reconstructing Early Radio Genres: The Case of Musical Variety”

Neil Verma (University of Chicago), “Impossible Scenes: The Fall of the City and the Problem of Representation in Radio Drama”

Elena Razlogova (Concordia University), “Radio Noise as Social Perception: From Wireless to Radio”

D16: Save to Continue: The State of Video Game Archiving and Preservation

Room: St. James

Chair: Matthew Payne (University of Alabama)

Workshop Participants:

Henry Lowood (Stanford University)

Ken McAllister (University of Arizona)David O’Grady (University of California, Los Angeles)

Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University)

Megan Winget (University of Texas, Austin)

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THURSDAY, March 22

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Thursday, March 22, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session E)

 E10: On the (Re)Death of Radio: Continuities and Changes in Radio in the 21st Century Part I : Technologies

 Room: Constitution

Chair: Alexander Russo (Catholic University of America)

Tona Hangen (Worcester State University), “Troubleshooting the Wayback Machine: When Radio Goes Online”

Kathleen Griffin (University of Brighton), “Shifting Sands: The Changing Power Relations Between Listeners and Programme Makers”

Andrew Ó Baoill (Cazenovia College), “Degrees of Freedom: How Community Radio Stations Are Responding to New Distribution Channels”

Christina Dunbar-Hester (Rutgers University), “The Symbolic Value of Technical Practice in 21st-Century Radio Activism”

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E21: Digital Methodologies for Screen Histories: Performing Research in the 21st Century

Room: Whittier

Chair: Paul Moore (Ryerson University)

Workshop Participants:

Richard Abel (University of Michigan)

Janet Bergstrom (University of California, Los Angeles)

Ross Melnick (Oakland University)

Jan Olsson (Stockholm University)

James Steffen (Emory University)

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Thursday, March 22, 2012 11:00AM-12:45PM (Session F)

 F7: Signal Traffic: Researching Media Infrastructures

 Room: Cambridge

Chair: Cristina Venegas (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Lisa Parks (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Beaming the Audiovisual: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures”

Jonathan Sterne (McGill University), “Audible Infrastructures and Telephone Effects”

Nicole Starosielski (Miami University Ohio), “Disappearing Infrastructures: Undersea Cables and Narratives of Connection”

Shannon Mattern (The New School), “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure”

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F10: On the (Re)Death of Radio: Continuities and Changes in Radio in the 21st Century, Part II: Programming

Room: Holmes

Chair: Christina Dunbar-Hester (Rutgers University)

Cynthia Conti (New York University), “Localizing Localism: The Complexities of LPFM Broadcasting”

Alexander Russo (Catholic University of America), “‘Beyond’ the Terrestrial?: Distribution, Formats, and the Place of the Local in Satellite Radio”

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “I Want My NPR.org/Music: ‘Independent’ Popular Music Culture and American Public Broadcasting in the Digital Convergence Era”

Jason Loviglio (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), “NPR’s Useful Crises”

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Thursday, March 22, 2012 01:00PM-02:45PM (Session G)

 G21: Sound Thinking: Rick Altman and Sound Studies

 Room: Whittier

Chair: Jay Beck (Carleton College)

Co-Chair: Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario)

Workshop Participants:

John Belton (Rutgers University)

Donald Crafton (University of Notre Dame)

Michele Hilmes (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Amy Lawrence (Dartmouth University)

Jonathan Sterne (McGill University)

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Thursday, March 22, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM (Session H)

 H7: Playing With Feelings 1: Video Games and Affect

 Room: Cambridge

Chair: Aubrey Anable (University of Toronto)

Seth Mulliken (North Carolina State University, Raleigh), “The Order of Hardness: Rhythm-Based Games and Sonic Affect”

Laura Cook Kenna (George Washington University), “Feeling Empathetic? . . . Ironic? . . . Postracial?: Grand Theft Auto’s Offers of Affective Engagement with Ethnic and Racial Difference”

Allyson Shaffer (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), “Playing Life, Managing Play”

Aubrey Anable (University of Toronto), “Casual Games, Serious Play, and the Affective Economy

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Thursday, March 22, 2012 05:00PM-06:45PM (Session I)

I2: Music on Television

Room: Back Bay

Chair: Matt Delmont (Scripps College)

Mikal Gaines (Emmanuel College), “Undead Carnival: Monsters, Magic, and Black Self-Making in Michael Jackson’s Thriller“

Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario), “How Commercial Is Too Commercial? Hootenanny and the Struggle Over Folk Authenticity”

Matt Delmont (Scripps College), “‘They’ll Be Rockin’ on Bandstand, in Philadelphia, PA’: Imagining National Youth Culture on American Bandstand”

I8: “Time to Smile”: Conceptualizing the Form and Place of Radio Comedy in the 1930s

 Room: Charles River

Chair: Cynthia Meyers (College of Mount Saint Vincent)

Co-Chair: David Weinstein (National Endowment for the Humanities)

Cynthia Meyers (College of Mount Saint Vincent), “‘Resist the Usual’: Young & Rubicam’s Soft Sell Strategies in Radio Comedy Programming”

David Weinstein (National Endowment for the Humanities), “‘The Apostle of Pep’ Tackles the Airwaves: Eddie Cantor and Broadway Style in 1930s Radio”

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Georgia State University), “Reinventing Jack Benny: Developing the Character-Focused ‘Comedy Situation’ for Radio”

Jennifer Wang (Independent Scholar), “Why Women Aren’t Funny?: The Marginalization of Comedy in 1930’s Daytime Radio”

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I25: Video Essays: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Form

Room: Longfellow

Chair: Girish Shambu (Canisius College)

Workshop Participants:

Christian Keathley (Middlebury College)

Catherine Grant (University of Sussex)

Benjamin Sampson (University of California, Los Angeles)

Richard Misek (University of Bristol)

Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida)

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Thursday Individual Papers of Interest:

Deniz Bayrakdar (Kadir Has University), “Silence of Sound and Image in the New Cinema in Turkey, 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Constitution

David Gurney (Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi), “‘Put These in Your Ear-Holes’: The Sonic Assemblages of [adult swim], 03:00PM-04:45PM, Room: Cabot

Krin Gabbard (Stony Brook University), “‘Throw It Away’: Abbey Lincoln in Hollywood,” 03:00PM-04:45PM, Room: St. James

Hannah Frank (University of Chicago), “The Invisible Visible and the Inaudible Audible: Testing the Limits of Vertov’s Kino-Eye,” 05:00PM-06:45PM, Room: Board Room

Events:

The Sound Studies SIG and the Television Studies SIG are co-sponsoring a party at Scholar’s Bistro Boston, 95 School Street, a nice walk through the Public Garden and Boston Common from the conference site.  The festivities start after the Television Studies SIG meeting, which lasts until 8:45, so plan on arriving at Scholars after that.  .

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The Boston Typewriter Orchestra

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Friday, March 23

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Friday, March 23, 2012

Friday, March 23, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session J)

 J6: The iPad for Cinema and Media Studies: A Hands (and Fingers)-on Workshop

Room: Cabot

Chair: Andrew Miller (Sacred Heart University)

Co-Chair: Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University)

Workshop Participants:

Michael Aronson (University of Oregon)

Elizabeth Ellcessor (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Phoebe Bronstein (University of Oregon)

Dan Leopard (Saint Mary’s College of California)

Heidi Cooley (University of South Carolina)

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Friday, March 23, 2012 12:15PM-02:00PM (Session K)

 K6: Sonic Approaches to Genre

Room: Cabot

Chair: Mark Kerins (Southern Methodist University)

Co-Chair: William Whittington (University of Southern California)

Benjamin Wright (University of Southern California), “The Sonic Compass: Re-recording Mixing Choices and The Bourne Ultimatum“

Vanessa Ament-Gjenvick (Georgia State University), “‘How Would You Like To Work on a Monster Movie?’: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Technological Convergence, and Sound Design Authorship”

Mark Kerins (Southern Methodist University), “Genre Effects on Surround Sound Gaming”

William Whittington (University of Southern California), “The Cinema of Disorientation: A Hearing on Horror

Friday, March 23, 2012 02:15PM-04:00PM (Session L)

L17: Bridging Disciplines in Media and Urban Studies

Room: Stanhope

Chair: Joshua Gleich (University of Texas, Austin)

Workshop Participants:

Mark Shiel (King’s College London)

Joshua Gleich (University of Texas, Austin)Merrill Schleier (University of the Pacific)

Erica Stein (University of Arizona)

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L21: Over the Borderline: Transnational Radio Histories

 Room: Whittier

Chair: Derek Vaillant (University of Michigan)

Derek Vaillant (University of Michigan), “Sounds Too French: The Challenges of US-France Transatlantic Broadcasting, 1920-1939″

Gisela Cramer (University of Colombia-Bogota), “The Shortcomings of Shortwave: US Programming to Latin America during World War II”

Jennifer Spohrer (Bryn Mawr College), “Visions and Realities of International Commercial Broadcasting: Radio Luxembourg in the 1930s”

Michele Hilmes (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Building Bridges, Crossing Wires: The BBC’s North American Service”

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Friday Individual Papers of Interest:

Juana Suarez (New York University), “Beyond Entertainment: Radio, Comedia Ranchera, and the Political Agenda of Colombian Films from the 1940s,” 12:15PM-02:00PM, Room: Constitution

Julianne Pidduck (University of Montreal), “Thinking the Audiovisual Relation: Su Friedrich’s Experimental Kinship Documents,”  02:15PM-04:00PM, Room: White Hill

Friday Events:

The organizational meeting to establish a Radio Studies SIG is Friday morning, March 23, from 9am – 10:45am in the Stanbro Room Level 4.

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Saturday, March 24
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Saturday, March 24, 2012

Saturday, March 24, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session M)

M6: Why Apps Can’t Argue . . . Or Can They? The Critical Essay, Screen Cultures, and the Digital Humanities

Room: Cabot

Chair: James Tobias (University of California, Riverside)

 James Tobias (University of California, Riverside), “Histories and Futures of the Critical Audiovisual Essay: Kit Literatures, Audiovisual Composition, and Scholarly Uses of Vernacular Media”

Holly Willis (University of Southern California), “The Letter and the Line: Text in Film and Video”

Steve Anderson (University of Southern California), “Technologies of Critical Writing: On the War between Data and Images”

Ian Ross (University of California, Riverside), “Hardware as Argument: Finding the Essayistic in Hardware Modding Considered as Material Semiotic Practice”

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M13: Violent Images

 Room: Holmes

 Chair: Ora Gelley (North Carolina State University)

Asbjorn Gronstad (University of Bergen), “Archives of Violence”

Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University), “Revisiting an Empathetic Music: Visible Violence and the Audible Offscreen”

Julian Hanich (Freie Universtitaet Berlin), “Suggestive Verbalizations: Evoking Cinematic Violence through Words”

Ora Gelley (North Carolina State University), “Narrative Form, Violence, and the Female Body

Saturday, March 24, 2012 11:00AM-12:45PM (Session N)

N3: Unforgettable: Popular Music and Memory on Film

 Room: Beacon Hill

Chair: Katherine Spring (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Respondent: Jeff Smith (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Michael Dwyer (Arcadia University), “Old Time Rock and Roll: Fifties Nostalgia on Hollywood Soundtracks”

Sangeeta Marwah (University of Southern California), “The Hindi Film Song: Narrative, Cultural Memory, and Identity”

Ethan de Seife (Hofstra University), “Old Times Were Good Times: Neil Young Remembers Greendale”

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N15: A Scholarship of Audiovision: Theory/Praxis/Production in the 21st Century

Room: Newbury

Chair: Brigitta Wagner (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Workshop Participants:

Brigitta Wagner (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Charles Musser (Yale University)

Gabriel Paletz (Prague Film School)

Hanna Shell (Harvard University)

Jesse Shapins (Harvard University)

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N23: “You Are Who, Exactly?”: A Workshop on Working with Non-traditional Scholars 
Room: Franklin 
Chair: Joan Saab (University of Rochester)

Workshop Participants:

Art Blake (Ryerson University)

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (State University of New York Binghamton)

Philip Leers (University of California Los Angeles)

Nicholas Sammond (University of Toronto)

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Saturday, March 24, 2012 01:00PM-02:45PM (Session O)

O1: Laughter That “Encounters a Void?”: On Humor and Cinema in the Middle East

Room: Alcott

Chair: Hossein Khosrowjah (California College of Arts)

Perin Gurel (Dickinson College), “America, the (Oppressively) Funny: Humor and Anti-Americanisms in Modern Turkish Cinema”

Roberta Di Carmine (Western Illinois University), “Israeli Comedy’s Multiple Voices/Languages in The Band’s Visit”

Elise Burton (Harvard University), “Ethnic Humor, Stereotypes, and Cultural Power in Israeli Cinema”

Iris Fruchter-Ronen (University of Haifa), “Humor and Gender in Nadin Labaki’s Films: Caramel and Where Do We Go Now?”

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O8: Contemporary Latin American Cinema and the New Latin American Cinema: Aesthetic and Ethical Continuities and Discontinuities

Room: Charles River

Chair: Cynthia Tompkins (Arizona State University)

Respondent: Claudia Ferma (University of Richmond)

Ana Forcinito (University of Minnesota), “Almost a Voice Over: Echoes and Distortions in the New Argentina Cinema Directed by Women”

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O9: Sound Across Media and Genre

Room: Emerson

Chair: Todd Decker (Washington University, St. Louis)

Kristen Hatch (University of California, Irvine), “Harlem in Hollywood: The ‘Negro Vogue’ of the Early Sound Era”

Hannah Allen (Michigan State University), “The Obscene Scream: Aurality in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre“

Michelle Puetz (University of Chicago), “Projecting Sound as Image”

Todd Decker (Washington University, St. Louis), “Elegies in Waltz Time: Meter, Memory, and Remembrance in Band of Brothers (2001)

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O13: New Perspectives in Cinema and Multilingualism

Room: Holmes

Chair: Tijana Mamula (John Cabot University)

Co-Chair: Peter Sarram (John Cabot University)

Brian Hochman (Georgetown University), “Plains Indian Sign Language and the Protocinematic Aesthetic”

Charles Linscott (Ohio University), “The Talking Money Order: Mandabi and the Languages of Globalization”

Mara Matta (University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’), “Talking Back: The Issue of Multilingualism in Northeast Indian Cinema”

Jaap Verheul (New York University), “Divided in Unity: European Integration versus Regional Language in Dutch and Flemish Cinema”

Saturday, March 24, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM (Session P)

P8: DVDs UnpackedTales of Glocal Piracy and Stardom

Chair: Monika Mehta (University of Binghamton, SUNY)

Room: Charles River

Jasmine Trice (National University of Singapore), “Action Stars and Indie Cinema: Global Media Piracy and Local Cultural Production in the Philippines”

Suzanne L. Schulz (University of Texas, Austin), “Law, Order, and the DVD: On the Containment of Discs in India”

Monika Mehta (University of Binghamton, SUNY), “DVD Compilations of Hindi Film Songs: (Re) Shuffling Sound, Stardom, and Cinephilia”

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Saturday, March 24, 2012 05:00PM-06:45PM (Session Q)

 Q2: Sing-a-longs and Dance-a-thons: Re-visioning the Contemporary Musical on Film and Television

 Room: Back Bay

 Chair: Aviva Dove-Viebahn (University of Northern Colorado)

Kenneth Chan (University of Northern Colorado), “Swinging and Swaying the Body Cultural Politics: Musicalizing the Already Musical Hairspray“

Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa), “Notorious and the Apparent Contradictions of the Contemporary Musical Biopic”

Tamar Ditzian (University of Florida), “Transgender’s Transgressions Undone in Hedwig and Rocky Horror: Reviewing Queerness in the Glam Rock Musical”

Kyra Glass von der Osten (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Musical Marriage: The Mash-Up as Governing Principle in Glee”

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Q12: Materialities of Film Sound

Room: Gloucester

Chair: Delia Konzett (University of New Hampshire)

Delia Konzett (University of New Hampshire), “Sound in War/Combat Film”

Walter Metz (Southern Illinois University), “‘Here’s to Ben!’: Visual Sound in the Films of David Lynch”

Michael Wutz (Weber State University), “Notes toward a Media-Historical History of Sound in Film

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Q16: Collective Scholarship in Digital Contexts

Room: St. James

Chair: Kristina Busse (Independent Scholar)

Workshop Participants:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Modern Language Association)

Jason Mittell (Middlebury College)

Richard Edwards (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis)

Louisa Stein (Middlebury College)

Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College)

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Saturday Individual Papers of Interest

Karen Backstein (Sterling Publishing), “Documenting Musica Brasileira: Culture, History, Memory in the Brazilian Music Documentary,” 09:00AM-10:45AM, Room: Constitution

Jason Zuzga (University of Pennsylvania), “The Violent, Silent World: Affect, History, and Ethical Orientation on Screen and at Sea,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Stanhope

Andrea Kelley (Indiana University), “From the Factory to the Ferry: Soundies’ Sites of Exhibition,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Stuart

Lisa Coulthard (University of British Columbia), “Dirty Sound: The Ethics of Noise in the New Extremity,” 01:00PM-02:45PM, Room: Constitution

Nina Cartier (Northwestern University), “Supa Soul Cinema: Blaxploitation Narration,” 01:00PM-02:45PM, Room: Newbury

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SUNDAY, March 25

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Sunday, March 25, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session R)

R18: Radio Dynamics

Room: Stuart

Chair: David Uskovich (University of Texas, Austin)

Mette Simonsen Abildgaard (Southern University Denmark), “Intimate Messages: A History of Interactions in Youth Radio”

Catherine Martin (Boston University), “Re-imagining the City: Contained Criminality in The Radio Adventures of Sam Spade“

Adrienne Foreman (Texas A&M University), “From Revolt to Style: Movements in Advertising and Text from The Maltese Falcon and The Adventures of Sam Spade“

David Uskovich (University of Texas, Austin), “Programming Practice and Musical Genre: 1980s College Radio and the hifting Meanings of ‘Alternative’”

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R25: Expanded Cinema in Four Dimensions: Origins, Senses, Interactivity, Publicness

Room: Longfellow

Chair: Dimitrios Latsis (University of Iowa)

Dimitrios Latsis (University of Iowa), “Expanding Cinema: Genealogies of the Para-cinematic within American AvantGarde Cinema”

Justus Nieland (Michigan State University), “‘The Scale Is the World’: Expanded Cinema and the Midcentury Sensorium”

Marina Hassapopoulou (University of Florida), “Interactive Cinema: Expanding and Updating Film Theory”

Annie Dell’ Aria (CUNY Graduate Center), “Critical Synthesis: Reading Krzysztof Wodiczko through Film Theory”

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Sunday, March 25, 2012 11:00AM-12:45PM (Session S)

S3: Interwar Sounds

Room: Beacon Hill

Chair: Michael Slowik (University of Iowa)

Jessica Fowler (University of California, Los Angeles), “Open to Interpretation: Multiple Language Versions (MLVs) in the Early Sound Era”

Matthew Perkins (University of California, Los Angeles), “Can You Hear Me Now? Sound Department Creation and Personnel During the Transition to the Talkies”

Brian Hanrahan (Cornell University), “Radio, Film, Radio-Film: Intermedial Comparison in Discourses of Early German Broadcasting”

Michael Slowik (University of Iowa), “Why Max Steiner Was Wrong, Or, Re-recording and the Hollywood Film Score, 1929 to 1931″

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Sunday Individual Papers of Interest:

Paul Fileri (New York University), “Documentary Voices in the Algerian War: State Violence, Colonial Bureaucratic Filmmaking, and the Figure of the Refugee,” 09:00AM-10:45AM, Room: Whittier

Kiranmayi Indraganti (Ramoji Academy of Film and Television), “Song Taxonomies: New Categories of Songs in the Telugu Language Cinema in the Decade of 2000-2010,” Room: Back Bay

Robert Buerkle (University of Pittsburgh), “At a Loss for Words: Portal 2 and the Silent Avatar,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Cambridge

Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida), “Writing Sounds: Cinematic Writing and Cinephilia,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Emerson

Inez Hedges (Northeastern University), “White Flash: Silence and Amnesia in Japanese A-Bomb Films,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: St. James

Aniruddha Maitra (Brown University), “‘Narcissisizing’ the Locally Global: Language, Image, and a ‘Touch’ of Untranslatability in Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,”11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Stuart

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Clik here to view.Happy new year, dear Sounding Out! readers! Early January brings about New Year’s resolutions, specials on bins for holiday ornaments, Three Kings’ Day, and our yearly MLA sound studies panel round-up. This year, MLA 2014 attendees will get another blast of cold temperatures because this year’s convention is in Chicago—not much of a difference weather-wise from Boston but just as exciting! If you’re undecided about what panels to check out or if you’re not sure about where to start with the MLA Program, you’re in the right place: I combed the MLA Program page by page and condensed it just for our sound studies aficionados. If you’re sitting this MLA out or if you’re just curious about what the following panels are all about, it’s easy to follow the conference from home if you have access to Twitter. MLA is one of the most active academic conferences on social media: there’s the lively twitter hashtag #MLA14, the individual hashtags for each session (#s–followed by the session number), and an attentive twitter account (@MLAConvention), so even if you’re not in Chi-town you can still see what’s going on at your favorite panels this week.

Whereas last year some of the sound-oriented panels had a particular digital angle, this year there are several panels look at the intersection of sound and literary studies. The titles may not suggest sound, but the presentations do. For example, panel #s384 Literary Crossroads: African American Literature and Christianity includes presentations on representations of gospel and spirituality in different African American books. Another panel of interest is #s414, Literature and Media in the Nineteenth-Century United States arranged by the Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature. (This panel resonates nicely with Sounding Out!’s Sound in the Nineteenth Century forum which just ended last Monday.) The focus on literature may come from the fact that the MLA brings many literary scholars together, but it is encouraging that the study of sound is also overlapping with the study of literature.

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“Street Musicians, Chicago” by Flickr user Diana Schnuth, CC-BY-NC-2.0

Despite that the convention brings literature scholars from across the United States together, some of the more intriguing sound-oriented panels are not focused on literature at all. In fact, several panels address sound from the angle of music. Panel #s131, The Musics of Chicago brings together High Fidelity and Lupe Fiasco, and panel #s162 on the HBO series Girls includes Chloe H. Johnson’s paper “Dancing on My Own: Popular Music and Issues of Identity in Girls.“ Although the fields of literary studies and cultural studies are sometimes in tension with each other, some MLA presenters are approaching popular culture particularly from an aural angle.

Music is not the only presence of sound in the MLA Program. Several panels bring up sound in conjunction with pedagogy. Some of our readers may remember the forum Sounding Out! hosted last year on sound and pedagogy—a forum of which I was a part. I’m glad to see other language, composition, and literature teachers are thinking about sound too. Panel #s114, Dialects of English Worldwide: Issues in English Language Studies includes several papers that think about spoken English nowadays. For those who are interested in how the sound of students’ speech are intersected by structural racism and public policy will find lots to think about with this panel. If you’re looking for concrete suggestions on using sound as a pedagogical approach, panel #s213 has some answers. Twenty-First-Century Pedagogies, arranged by the Discussion Group on the Two-Year College includes a presentation on sound essays by Kathryn O’Donoghue from the Graduate Center at City Univ. of New York.

Where will Team SO! be at MLA 2014? Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman can be found at the DH Commons pre-conference workshop on Thursday, January 9, 2014; she will be presenting Friday, January 10 at 8:30 am on her research on Lead belly and Richard Wright as part of panel #s221, Singing Out in the American Literary Experience. Regular writer Regina Bradley will be presenting Friday at 5:15 pm on panel #s403 Words, Works, and New Archives: Studying African American Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Guest blogger Scott Poulson-Bryant will be at panel #s447, The Seventies in Black and White: A Soundtrack on Saturday at 8:30 am. I will be presenting on Friday morning at panel #s218, a roundtable on the graduate seminar paper and will be leading panel #s788, Back Up Your Work: Conceptualizing Writing Support for Graduate Students on Sunday at 1:45 pm. You can catch us on Twitter: @lianamsilvaford and @soundingoutblog where we’ll be live-tweeting panels and keeping followers up to date on convention chatter. Who knows, maybe there’ll be an impromptu SO! tweet-up? Stay tuned to our social media feeds!

Before I go, a shameless plug: As of this month I am the new editor of the newsletter Women in Higher Education, so if you want to meet up and talk about the newsletter please let me know!

Did I miss something? Maybe I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up? Please let me know either via email, via tweet, or post on the Sounding Out! Facebook page.

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Liana Silva-Ford is co-founder and Managing Editor of Sounding Out!.

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Featured image: “Mississippi North” by Flickr user John W. Iwanski, CC-BY-NC-2.0

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Jump to THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2014
Jump to FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2014
Jump to SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2014
Jump to SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2014

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“Television Sam (I’m Your Main Man)” by Flickr user the justified sinner, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2014

8:30 am-11:30 am 
3. Get Started in the Digital Humanities with Help from DHCommons

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING: Ryan Cordell, Northeastern Univ.; Josh Honn, Northwestern Univ.; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.

The workshop welcomes language and literature scholars who wish to learn about, pursue, or join digital humanities (DH) projects but do not have the institutional infrastructure to support them. Representatives of DH projects and initiatives will share their expertise on project design, outline available resources and opportunities, and lead small-group training sessions on DH technologies and skills. Preregistration required.

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

31. Radical Curators, Vulnerable Genres: Lost Histories of Collecting, Editing, Bibliography

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott

PRESIDING: Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

SPEAKERS:

Jessica J. Beard, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz;

Alex Black, Cornell Univ.;

Jane Greenway Carr, New York Univ.;

Ellen Gruber Garvey, New Jersey City Univ.

Laura Helton, Univ. of Virginia

Courtney Thorsson, Univ. of Oregon

33. Sir Walter Scott and Music

Sheffield, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations

PRESIDING: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

1. “Cutting Out the Castle Quicksand: Scott’s Bride, Donizetti’s Lucia, and the ‘Personally Furious’ Ayn Rand,” Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.

2. “‘Drifting through the Intellectual Atmosphere’ from Scott’s Old Morality to Liszt’s Hexameron,” Catherine Ludlow, Western Illinois Univ.

3. “Walter Scott, British Identity, and International Grand Opera: Isidore de Lara’s Amy Robsart(1893),” Tommaso Sabbatini, Univ. of Chicago

For abstracts, visit lyricasociety.org.

1:45-3:00 pm

75. Voice and Silence

Mississippi, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on French Medieval Language and Literature

PRESIDING: Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Boston Coll.

1. “Gut Feelings,” Jason D. Jacobs, Roger Williams Univ.

2. “Tomboy Silence,” Wan-Chuan Kao, Washington and Lee Univ.

3. “Giving Voice to the Word of God; or, Bernard of Clairvaux Sings the Song of Songs,” Kris Trujillo, Univ. of California, Berkeley

3:30-4:45

114. Dialects of English Worldwide: Issues in English Language Studies

Illinois, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Present-Day English Language 

PRESIDING: Elizabeth Bell Canon, Emory Univ.

1. “‘Speak the Language of Your Flag’: American Policy Responses to Nonanglophone Immigrants,” Dennis E. Baron, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

2. “The Sounds of Silence: Standard and Nonstandard Englishes in Contemporary Ethnic American Writing,” Melissa Dennihy, Queensborough Community Coll., City Univ. of New York

3. “Star Spanglish Banter: Harnessing Students’ Linguistic Expertise,” Jill Hallett, Northeastern Illinois Univ.

4. “Emerging Attitudes toward New Media within the Discourses of Poetics and Literature,” April Pierce, Univ. of Oxford

5:15-6:30

131. The Musics of Chicago

Chicago H, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING: Shawn Higgins, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

1. “Sweet Home Chicago? (Dis)Locating the American ‘Race Record’ in High Fidelity,” Jürgen E. Grandt, Univ. of North Georgia

2. “Experiment and Exodus in the Music of Chicago,” Toshiyuki Ohwada, Keio Univ.

3. “Fly Girls or Blackface? The Racial and Gender Politics of Lupe Fiasco,” Jorge Santos, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

141. Enduring Noise: Sound and Sexual Difference

Illinois, Chicago Marriott

PRESIDING: Rizvana Bradley, Emory Univ.

1. “Listening to Gertrude Stein’s Repeating: Sonorous Temporality in The Making of Americans,” Erin McNellis, Univ. of California, Irvine

2. “Queer Extensities: Pauline Oliveros and Disco,” Amalle Dublon, Duke Univ.

3. “Metal, Reproduction, and the Politics of Doom,” Aliza Shvarts, New York Univ.

RESPONDING: Rizvana Bradley

7:00-8:15 pm

162. Girls and the F Word: Twenty-First-Century Representations of Women’s Lives

Los Angeles–Miami, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Tahneer Oksman, Marymount Manhattan Coll.

1. “‘My Shoes Match My Dress . . . Kind Of!’: The Politics of Dressing and Nakedness in Girls,” Laura Scroggs, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities

2. “She’s Just Not That into You: Girls, Dating, and Damage,” Jennifer Mitchell, Weber State Univ.

3. “Dancing on My Own: Popular Music and Issues of Identity in Girls,” Chloe H. Johnson, York Univ., Keele

RESPONDING: Nancy K. Miller, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

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“Untitled” by Flickr user d76, CC-BY-NC-2.0

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2014

8:30 am-9:45 am

207. Diversifying the Victorian Verse Archives

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Meredith Martin, Princeton Univ.

1. “Recovering Tennyson’s ‘Melody in Poetry’: Salon Recitations and Musical Settings,” Phyllis Weliver, Saint Louis Univ.

2. “Morris Metrics: The Work of Meter in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Yopie Prins, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

3. “Digital Archives and the Music of Victorian Poetry,” Joanna Swafford, Univ. of Virginia

For abstracts, visit https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/diversifying-the-victorian-verse-archives/

213. Twenty-First-Century Pedagogies

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on the Two-Year College 

PRESIDING: Stacey Lee Donohue, Central Oregon Community Coll.

1. “Not on Wikipedia: Making the Local Visible,” Laurel Harris, Queensborough Community Coll., City Univ. of New York

2. “Survival Spanish Online: Designing a Community College Course That Bridges Culture and Authentic Connections,” Cecilia McGinniss Kennedy, Clark State Community Coll., OH

3. “Sound Essays: A Cure for the Common Core,” Kathryn O’Donoghue, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

4. “Leveling Up! Gamifying the Literature Classroom,” Jessica Lewis-Turner, Temple Univ., Philadelphia

For abstracts, visit commons.mla.org/groups/the-two-year-college/announcements/ after 15 Dec.

217. Cuba on Stage

Arkansas, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Production 

PRESIDING: Vicky Unruh, Univ. of Kansas

1. “José Triana, Virgilio Piñera, and the Racial Erotics of Cuban Tragedy,” Armando Garcia, Univ. of Pittsburgh

2. “Estorino’s Gray Ghosts,” David Lisenby, Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York

3. “Musical Trangressions on the Cuban Stage: Rap, Rock, and Reggaeton,” Elena Valdez, Swarthmore Coll.

4. “Locating the Malecón,” Bretton White, Colby Coll.

221. Singing Out in the American Literary Experience

Old Town, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Folklore and Literature 

PRESIDING: Mark Allan Jackson, Middle Tennessee State Univ.

1. “Re-sounding Folk Voice, Remaking the Ballad: Alan Lomax, Margaret Walker, and the New Criticism,” Derek Furr, Bard Coll.

2. “‘A Voice to Match All That’: Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and Lynching’s Sound Track,” Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York

3. “Stunting Gualinto: The Limits of Corrido Heroism in Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez,” Melanie Hernandez, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

For abstracts, write to majackso@mtsu.edu.

10:15-11:30

261. Applying Linguistics to the Learning of Middle Eastern Languages

Huron, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on General Linguistics 

PRESIDING: Terrence Potter, Georgetown Univ.

1. “How Strategic Can They Be? Differences between Student and Instructor Attitudes toward Language Learning Strategies,” Gregory Ebner, United States Military Acad.

2. “Needs-Analysis Informed Task Design in Arabic Foreign Language Programs in the United States: Insights from Learner Perceptions and Production,” Maimoonah Al Khalil, King Saud Univ., Riyadh

3. “Linguistic Advantages and Constraints in the Classroom: Judeo-Spanish as an L2,” Bryan Kirschen, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

For abstracts, write to tmp28@georgetown.edu.

263. John Clare: The Voices of Nature

Chicago C, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the John Clare Society of North America 

PRESIDING: Rochelle Johnson, Coll. of Idaho

1. “Speaking for the Trees: Margaret Cavendish, John Clare, and Voicing Nature,” Bridget Mary Keegan, Creighton Univ.

2. “Clare’s Air: Sound in Motion,” Paul Chirico, Univ. of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Coll.

3. “John Clare: The Unusual and Challenging Natural Historian,” Eric H. Robinson, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

269A. Chicago Latina/o Writing: A Creative Conversation

Sheraton I, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Office of the Executive Director 

PRESIDING: Ariana Ruiz, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

SPEAKERS: Rey Andújar, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe

Brenda Cárdenas, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Paul Martínez Pompa, Triton Coll.

Achy Obejas, Chicago, IL

270. Women’s Education in Third World Countries

Parlor G, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture and Society 

PRESIDING : Shirin E. Edwin, Sam Houston State Univ.

1. “Narrative Approaches to Transmitting Regional Oral and Instrumental Literary Traditions in the Works of Aminata Sow Fall,” Julie Ann Huntington, Marymount Manhattan Coll.

2. “Gender, Class, and Education: Intersections in South Asian Literature,” Maryse Jayasuriya, Univ. of Texas, El Paso

3. “Women’s Schooling in Clarice Lispector’s Narrative: A Brazilian Education,” Alejandro E. Latinez, Sam Houston State Univ.

279. Dadaphone: Indeterminacy in Words and Music

Huron, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations and the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism 

PRESIDING : Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

1. “Black Dada,” Kathy Lou Schultz, Univ. of Memphis

2. “Aleatory Adaptation and Indeterminate Interpretation: Radiohead’s In Rainbows as Faustian Rock Opera,” Meg Tarquinio Roche, Northeastern Univ.

3. “Game Changer: Cage’s Word-Music Combination in ‘Renunion’ and ‘Solo 23,’” Sydney Boyd, Rice Univ.

4. “Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music and Its Debt to Dada,” Laura Prichard, Univ. of Massachusetts, Lowell

For abstracts, visit lyricasociety.org.

5:15 pm-6:30 pm

384. Literary Crossroads: African American Literature and Christianity

Addison, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Conference on Christianity and Literature and the Division on Literature and Religion 

PRESIDING: Katherine Clay Bassard, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.

1. “God’s Trombones, the Social Gospel, and the Harlem Renaissance,” Jonathan Fedors, Univ. of Pennsylvania

2. “When the Gospel Sings the Blues in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Claudia Rosemary May, Univ. of California, Berkeley

3. “Faith Moves: Belief and the Body in Bill T. Jones’s Chapel/Chapter and Toni Morrison’sParadise,” Leslie Elizabeth Wingard, Coll. of Wooster

For abstracts, write to kcbassar@vcu.edu.

403. Words, Works, and New Archives: Studying African American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the College Language Association 

PRESIDING : Warren Carson, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg

1. “The Field and Function of African American Literary Scholarship: A Memorial and a Challenge,” Dana A. Williams, Howard Univ.

2. “The Black Book: Creating an Interactive Research Environment,” Kenton Rambsy, Univ. of Kansas

3. “Keepin’ It Interactive: Hip-Hop in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” Regina Bradley, Kennesaw State Univ.; Jeremy Dean, Rap Genius, Inc.

414. Literature and Media in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature 

PRESIDING : Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

SPEAKERS: Jonathan Elmer, Indiana Univ., Bloomington

Teresa Alice Goddu, Vanderbilt Univ.

Naomi Greyser, Univ. of Iowa

Brian Hochman, Georgetown Univ.

Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette

Lauren A. Neefe, Stony Brook Univ., State Univ. of New York

For project statements, panelist biographies, and description of roundtable format, visit19thcamlitdiv.wordpress.com after 1 Dec.

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“Cubs Stomp” by Flickr user John W. Iwanski, CC-BY-NC-2.0

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2014

8:30 am-9:45 am

441. Socialist Senses

Ohio, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Slavic Literatures and Cultures 

PRESIDING : Nancy Condee, Univ. of Pittsburgh

1. “The Materiality of Sound: Esfir Shub’s Haptic Cinema,” Lilya Kaganovsky, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

2. “From the Cinema of Attractions to the Cinema of Affect in Early Socialist Realism,” R. J. D. Bird, Univ. of Chicago

3. “Ineluctable Modality of the Visible: Gorky’s Return and the Onset of Clarity,” Petre M. Petrov, Princeton Univ.

For abstracts, visit mlaslavic.blogspot.com/ after 30 Dec.

447. The Seventies in Black and White: A Soundtrack

Purdue-Wisconsin, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Jack Hamilton, Harvard Univ.

1. “Mutts of the Planet: Joni Mitchell Channels Charles Mingus,” David Yaffe, Syracuse Univ.

2. “Righteous Minstrels: Race, Writing, and the Clash,” Jack Hamilton

3. “Broken Masculinities: Black Sound, White Men, and New York City,” Scott Poulson-Bryant, Harvard Univ.

10:15 am-11:30 am

474. African American Voices from the Civil War

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Timothy Sweet, West Virginia Univ., Morgantown

1. “The Color of Quaintness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Song, and American Union,”Jeremy Wells, Indiana Univ. Southeast

2. “‘If We Ever Expect to Be a Pepple’: The Literary Culture of African American Soldiers,” Christopher A. Hager, Trinity Coll., CT

3. “‘And Terrors Broke from Hill to Hill’: The Civil War Poems of George Moses Horton,” Faith Barrett, Duquesne Univ.

4. “The Negro in the American Rebellion: William Wells Brown and the Design of African American History,” John Ernest, Univ. of Delaware, Newark

485. Digital Practice: Social Networks across Borders

Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century German Literature 

PRESIDING : Stefanie Harris, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

1. “Kafka and the Kafkaesques: Close Reading Online Fan Fiction,” Bonnie Ruberg, Univ. of California, Berkeley

2. “Network Politics, Wireless Protocols, and Public Space,” Erik Born, Univ. of California, Berkeley

3. “Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media: Bandista,” Ela Gezen, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Responding: Yasemin Yildiz, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

For abstracts, visit german.berkeley.edu/transit.

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

508. Performing Blackness in the Nineteenth Century

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature 

PRESIDING : Harvey Young, Northwestern Univ.

1. “Being Touched: Sojourner Truth’s ‘Spiritual Theatre’ and the Genealogy of Radical Black Activism,” Jayna Brown, Univ. of California, Riverside

2. “Frederick Douglass and the ‘Claims’ of Democratic Individuality in Antebellum Political Theory,” Douglas Jones, Princeton Univ.

3. “’Dey Make Me Say Dat All De Time: Performance Art, Objecthood, and Joice Heth’s Sonic of Dissent,” Uri McMillan, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

509. Becoming Chroniclers: Latin American Women Writers and the Press, 1920–73

Parlor F, Sheraton Chicago 

PRESIDING : Vicky Unruh, Univ. of Kansas

1. “The Opportunities of Technology: Cube Bonifant’s Radiophonic Chronicles in El universal ilustrado,” Viviane A. Mahieux, Univ. of California, Irvine

2. “Key Moments in the Subversion of a Genre: Alfonsina Storni and Clarice Lispector Redefine Womanhood,” Mariela Méndez, Univ. of Richmond

3. “Issues of Gender and Genre: Isabel Allende and Clarice Lispector Writing Chronicles, 1968–73,” Claudia Mariana Darrigrandi, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

1:45 pm-3:00pm

572. Illness and Disability Memoir as Embodied Knowledge

Los Angeles–Miami, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession 

PRESIDING : Rachel Adams, Columbia Univ.

1. “Recoding Silence: Teresa de Cartagena, Medieval Sign Lexicons, and Deaf Life Writing,” Jonathan H. Hsy, George Washington Univ.

2. “‘Twisted and Deformed’: Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Crip-Feminist Autobiography,” Cynthia Barounis, Washington Univ. in St. Louis

3. “‘My Worry Now Accumulates’: Sensorial and Emotional Contagion in Autistic Life Writing,” Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell Coll.

For papers or abstracts, write to rea15@columbia.edu after 1 Jan.

3:30 pm-4:45 pm

586. Early Modern Media Ecologies

Great America, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING: Jen Boyle, Coastal Carolina Univ.

1. “Needlework Networks: Paper, Prints, and Female Authorship,” Whitney Trettien, Duke Univ.

2. “Sidney Circularities: Music and Script in the Contrafactum Lyric,” Scott A. Trudell, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

3. “Stage, Stall, Street, Sheet: Multimedia Shakespeare,” Adam G. Hooks, Univ. of Iowa

For abstracts, visit www.scotttrudell.com.

591. Multilingualism in Native American and Aboriginal Texts

Kane, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on American Indian Literatures 

PRESIDING : Beth H. Piatote, Univ. of California, Berkeley

1. “Reading Resistance and Resisting Readings in a Bilingual Text,” Laura J. Beard, Univ. of Alberta

2. “Narrative and Orthography in Cree Oral Histories,” Stephanie J. Fitzgerald, Univ. of Kansas

3. “Ongwe Onwe Languages in the Fourth Epoch of Iroquois History,” Penelope M. Kelsey, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder

4. “Poetics of ka ‘āina and na ‘ōiwi: Language(s) of Land, Earth, and the Hawaiian People in Haunani-Kay Trask’s Night Is a Sharkskin Drum,” Nicole Tabor, Moravian Coll.

5:15 pm-6:30 pm

624. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in Medieval and Early Modern England: Form and History

Old Town, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Ian Cornelius, Yale Univ.

1. “Singing and Speaking Boethius in Anglo-Saxon England,” Anne Schindel, Yale Univ.

2. “Sensible Prose and the Sense of Meter: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Boethius and After,” Eleanor Johnson, Columbia Univ.

3. “Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and an Expansive Theology in the Late Sixteenth Century: Queen Elizabeth’s Translation in Context,” Linda Suzanne Shenk, Iowa State Univ.

For abstracts, write to ian.cornelius@yale.edu.

625. Verbal and Visual Satire in the Nineteenth Century

Chicago F, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Joseph Litvak, Tufts Univ.

1. “Organizing Anarchy: Class, Intellectual Property, and Graphic Satire,” Jason Kolkey, Loyola Univ., Chicago

2. “The Reemergence of Radical Satire in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Frank A. Palmeri, Univ. of Miami

3. “Turn-of-the-Century Satirical Plots of Fenian and Anarchist Terrorism,” Jennifer Malia, Norfolk State Univ

645. Current Issues in Romance Linguistics

Parlor F, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Comparative Romance Linguistics 

PRESIDING : Andrea Perez Mukdsi, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York

1. “Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the Oral and Written Tradition,” Martin Hummel, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

2. “Pronouns and the Author-Reader Relationship in Academic Portuguese,” Karina Veronica Molsing, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Cristina Perna, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul

3. “The Semantic Feature [+INFLUENCE] and the Spanish Subjunctive,” M. Emma Ticio Quesada, Syracuse Univ.

4. “Palatalization in Chilean Spanish and Proto-romance,” Carolina Gonzalez, Florida State Univ.

For abstracts, write to perezmukdsi@gmail.com.

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SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2014

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

742. Socialist Culture in the Age of Disco: East European Popular Pleasures

Parlor F, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 

PRESIDING: Jessie M. Labov, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

1. “Imperial Disco: Czeslaw Milosz and Science Fiction,” Mikolaj Golubiewski, Free Univ.

2. “The ‘Movement of Writing Workers’ and State Stability in the 1970s German Democratic Republic,” William Waltz, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

3. “Flaming Socialist Creatures: Hippies as Auteurs in Soviet Latvia,” Mark Svede, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

For abstracts, visit mlaslavic.blogspot.com/.

744. Mass versus Coterie: The Audiobook

Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Prose Fiction 

PRESIDING : Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

1. “‘Fully Fleshed Out and Filled with Emotion’: Accent, Region, and Identification in the Reception of The Help,” Sydney Bufkin, Univ. of Texas, Austin

2. “Joyce, LibriVox, and the Recording Coterie,” Brandon Walsh, Univ. of Virginia

3. “Alien Stereo: China Mieville’s Embassytown,” Christopher Pizzino, Univ. of Georgia

1:45 pm-3:00 pm

788. Back Up Your Work: Conceptualizing Writing Support for Graduate Students

Grace, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Liana Silva-Ford, Houston, TX

SPEAKERS:

Tara Betts, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York;

Lee Ann Glowzenski, Duquesne Univ.;

Annemarie Pérez, Loyola Marymount Univ.

Abigail Scheg, Elizabeth City State Univ.

792. Old Materials, New Materialisms

Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Methods of Literary Research

1. “Objects, Authors, and Other Matter(s) in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive,” Suzanne M. Bost, Loyola Univ., Chicago

2. “Writing Histories of Listening: Acoustemology as Literary Practice,” Ely Rosenblum, Univ. of Cambridge

3. “Even the Stones Cry Out: Archival Research and the Inhuman Turn,” Andrew Ferguson, Univ. of Virginia

4. “A Life of Its Own: A Vital Materialist Look at the Medieval Manuscript as an Agentic Assemblage,” Angela Bennett Segler, New York Univ.

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Clik here to view.With a wide array of departmental affiliations and disciplinary backgrounds represented among its society membership, as well as an active and creative leadership, the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies is an excellent place to get a sense of where sound studies is and might be heading in the academy. To help read those tea leaves at this year’s upcoming conference in Seattle, we are thrilled to welcome one of the key figures working at the intersection of sound and media today, Denison University Communications Professor Bill Kirkpatrick.