Announcing Our Fall 2022 Class Grants
We’re thrilled to be able to offer small grants to further support our faculty in their new media classes.
This semester, we were able to support Tom McEnaney in his course "Sounding American." These funds will help Tom invite the following incredible guest lecturers: Chris Hoff (The World According To Sound), Andrew Leland (The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, the New Yorker), Daphne Brooks (Yale; author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound), Valeria Luiselli (author of Lost Children Archive, Tell Me How It Ends, The Story of My Teeth, among other novels and essays; 2019 Macarthur Fellow).
Their presence adds immeasurably to the course's challenge to the norms behind the concept of "sounding American" and speak to how media plays a central role in the connection between identity and sound.
From the Sounding American course description:
What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees? This course will explore these questions and others by studying podcasts, poems, songs, novels, and the changing forms of sonic technologies like microphones, radios, mp3s, turntables, and more. We will examine the social politics of “vocal fry,” the creation of sonic warfare, the techno-sonic inventions of hip hop, punk rock, and EDM, the surveillance of Siri and Alexa, and literature’s role in helping us learn to listen. Authors and songwriters will include Gloria Anzaldúa,Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, Harryette Mullen, Black Flag, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, David Sedaris, and others.