Imperial Sound Media - a Zoom Reading Group

[soph...@princeton.edu]

Dear All,

We are delighted to announce Imperial Sound Media, a virtual reading group sponsored by the Princeton Interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program (IHUM) for the 2020-2021 school year. Given that we will be holding our meetings on Zoom this year, we have decided to invite interested scholars from outside Princeton to participate. 

Our reading group examines some of the most significant technologies that facilitated the sonic development of colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on radio and the phonograph. We are graduate students in French & Italian and musicology, respectively, and we welcome interested participants from all disciplinary backgrounds. Throughout the year, we will explore a combination of theoretical and historical texts drawn from many disciplines: music, colonial history, history of science, anthropology, and sound studies. Together, we will understand better how sound shaped what it means to be a colonial subject, how these technologies were wielded by colonizers, and how colonized people appropriated them for their own purposes. 

We will meet on select Thursdays at 1:30PM Eastern for the fall semester. Each session will focus on a different topic and text(s). We will have guest speakers in attendance at some of the sessions. 

Our first session will be on Thursday, September 17 at 1:30PM Eastern. We will read selections from Daniel Headrick’s The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism (1988), and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2002).

Please email either reena[at]princeton[dot]edu or sophieal[at]princeton[dot]edu to be added to the mailing list. A dropbox link with PDFs of the readings and the Zoom link will be circulated well in advance of the first meeting. 

Please see https://ihum.princeton.edu/reading-groups/imperial-sound-media for more information and all dates for the fall semester.

Best,

Renée Altergott and Sophie Lewis Brady