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)