Programme

Acoustics of Empire

Sound, Media & Power in the Long 19th Century

Day 1, Friday

7 December, 2018

8:30-9 Arrival and Conference registration

9-9:20 Introduction and Welcome, David Trippett (Cambridge), PI on Sound and Materialism in the 19th century

9:20-10 Peter McMurray (Cambridge) and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Yale), “Towards a Global Acoustics?”

10-10.20 Coffee Break

PANEL 1: Sound, Image, Exoticism

Chair: Peter Asimov (Cambridge)

Respondent: Katharine Ellis (Cambridge)

10.20-11.10 Sindhumathi Revuluri (Harvard),  “Ethnography and exoticism in 19th-century France”

11.10-12 Rumya Putcha (Texas A&M), “Connecting Dance and Yoga: The Indian Body under the Logics of Empire”

12-1 Lunch

PANEL 2: Techniques of Aurality

Chair: Edward Gillin (Cambridge)

Respondent: David Trippett (Cambridge)

1-1.50 Gavin Steingo (Princeton), “Frontier Listening and the Epistemology of Deception”

1.50-2.40 Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State), “Murmumurations and Other Sounds of Acclimatization”

2.40-3 Coffee Break

PANEL 3: Performing Infrastructures

Chair: Ariana Phillips-Hutton (Cambridge)

Respondents: Melle Kromhout (Cambridge), Elleke Boehmer (Oxford)

3-3.50 Alejandra Bronfman (SUNY Albany), “Grappling All Day: Towards Another History of Telegraphy”

3.50-4.40 Arthur Asseraf (Cambridge), “Arab Telephone: Pan-Islamism and the Telegraph, 1897-1914”

4.40-5.30 James Davies (UC Berkeley), “White Genius, ca. 1818”

 

Day 2, Saturday

8 December 2018

8:30-9 Arrival and conference registration

PANEL 4: Urban Acoustics

Chair: Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (Cambridge)

Respondent: Peter McMurray (Cambridge)

9-9:50 Ziad Fahmy (Cornell), “Roads and Tracks: Modernity, Traffic and the Sensory Impact of Carriages, Trams and Automobiles in Egypt”

9:50-10:40  Nazan Maksudyan (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin), “Listening to Istanbul: Soundscapes of the Late Ottoman Empire”

10:40-11 Coffee Break

PANEL 5: Discourse Networks

Chair: Melle Kromhout (Cambridge)

Respondent: Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Yale)

11-11:50 Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang (Sungkonghoe University), “Trans-Pacific Listening: Boat Songs, Audible Prayers, and North American Missionaries in Early Twentieth-Century Korea”

11:50-12:40 Richard Williams (SOAS), “Sound, Science, and the Supernatural in Colonial North India”

12.40-1:30 Lunch

PANEL 6: Audiovisions

Chair: Rashel Pakbaz (Cambridge)

Respondent: Nicholas Cook (Cambridge)

1:30-2:20 Jairo Moreno (UPenn), “Aesthetic Capture: Edison’s Silent War (Cuba 1898)”

2.20-3.10 Ben Walton (Cambridge), “Listening through the Operatic Voice in 1820s Rio de Janeiro” 

3.10-3.30 Coffee Break

3.30-5:00 Concluding discussion with Elleke Boehmer (Oxford) and Nicholas Cook (Cambridge)