Professor, writer, Honorary Member of the Council of State, Special Adviser to the President of the Republic from 1981 to 1991, founder and first President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1993, Jacques Attali (www.attali.com) is currently CEO of A&A, an international consulting firm in strategy, based in… Read more »
Karin Bijsterveld is historian and professor of Science, Technology & Modern Culture at Maastricht University. She is author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT 2008), co-editor (with José van Dijck) of Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (AUP 2009), and co-editor (with Trevor Pinch) of The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012).
Mark J. Butler is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Program in Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University. He is a music theorist whose research addresses popular music, rhythm, and technologically mediated performance. He is the author of Unlocking the Groove (Indiana, 2006) and the editor of Electronica, Dance, and Club Music (Ashgate, 2012)…. Read more »
Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has published books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and postmodernism, as well as on topics such as ventriloquism, skin, flies, and air. His most recent books are Paraphernalia: The Curious… Read more »
Professor of Music on the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, Cusick has published extensively on gender and sexuality in relation to the musical cultures of early modern Italy and of contemporary North America. Her book, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power, was published in 2009… Read more »
Veit Erlmann is a cultural historian / anthropologist / ethnomusicologist and the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin. His main areas of interest are music and popular culture in South Africa and Indonesia; sound studies; and the anthropology of intellectual property law. His most recent publication is Reason and… Read more »
Wolfgang Ernst is Professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. He studied history, classics, and archeology; in the 1980s and 1990s his interests focused on theory of history, museology and the archive. His current research fields include reflections on time-based and time-critical media, their technological aspects and relations to sound (“the sonic”).
Charles Hirschkind is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. He is the author of The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, and co-edited the volume (with David Scott), Powers… Read more »
VIJAY IYER is a Grammy-nominated composer, pianist, bandleader, and writer based in New York. His recent recordings include Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project (2013), a collaboration with poet Mike Ladd and post-9/11 veterans of color; and the trio album Accelerando (2012), voted jazz album of 2012 in three international critics’ polls. His honors… Read more »
Thomas Y. Levin teaches media theory and history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and aesthetics. His essays have appeared in October Grey Room, New German Critique, Screen, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Musical Quarterly, ARCH+, Cahiers du MNAM, and Texte zur Kunst. Levin has translated and/or edited three books on the work of the Frankfurt School… Read more »
Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent publications include Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (with Erin Manning; University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2014) and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy… Read more »
Flagg Miller is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Davis. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Miller’s research focuses on cultures of modern Muslim reform in the Middle East. His current book project, Sounding Out Al-Qa`ida: Islamic Militancy, Asceticism, and the Bin Laden Phenomenon through Osama’s Own Audiotape Collection… Read more »
Mara Mills works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. She’s completing a book (On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering) on the significance of phonetics and deaf education to the emergence of “communication engineering” in early twentieth-century telephony; this concept and set of practices later gave rise to information theory, digital coding,… Read more »
Ana María Ochoa, Associate Professor, The Department of Music Columbia University and Director Center for Ethnomusicology of the same institution. Her interest in sound studies derives from research on practices of musical exchange and the relationship between listening and the politics of knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her main books are Entre los… Read more »
Aniruddh (Ani) Patel (Ph.D., 1996 Harvard OEB) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University. His research focuses on how the brain processes music and language, especially what the similarities and differences between the two reveal about each other and about the brain itself. He has pursued this topic with a… Read more »
Trevor Pinch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. He holds degrees in physics and sociology. He has authored many books and numerous articles on aspects of the sociology of science, the sociology of technology, the sociology of economics, and sound studies. His books include Analog Days: The… Read more »
Jonathan Sterne is a Professor at the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University. His work is broadly concerned with the form and role of communication technologies in large-scale societies. One of his major ongoing projects has been developing an adequate history and theory of sound in modernity. Beyond his work in sound… Read more »
Betsey Biggs is a composer and visual artist. Her work connects the dots between music, sound, visual art, place, storytelling, and technology, and has been described by The New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” She often collects scraps of sound and narrative fragments she encounters, and evocatively deconstructs… Read more »
Laura Frahm’s work explores cinema through the lens of architecture, music, and process philosophy. From 2008–2012 she was postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2008. Her main publications are: Beyond Space: Cinematic… Read more »
John Hamilton works primarily on Classical Greek, Latin, German, and French literature, focusing on topics in the History of Ideas, Reception Theory, Aesthetics, and Music. Previous teaching positions include the University of California-Santa Cruz (Classics) and New York University (Comparative Literature and German), with fellowships at the Institute for Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition at… Read more »
Ernst Karel’s recent audio publications are nonfiction works composed using location recordings; in performance he often combines location recordings with analog electronics to create multichannel pieces which move between nonfiction and abstraction. With a background as a musician, improviser, audio engineer, and anthropologist of sound, he has done postproduction sound for many productions of Harvard’s… Read more »
Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist, musician, and critic. He makes as little distinction between these practices as he can get away with. His work leverages music as a cultural signifier to interrogate our social, economic, and political assumptions. He has presented work at venues spanning the cultural spectrum, from CBGBs, the 100 Club, Maxwell’s, and… Read more »
Olivia Lucas is a graduate student in music theory at Harvard University, writing a dissertation on sound, technology and temporality in extreme metal. Her work examines the physical and cultural forces that create and support extreme metal, particularly in North America and the Nordic countries. Previous projects have included use of Kalevala materials in Finnish… Read more »
Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist and composer currently producing a media-rich dissertation on the acoustics of Islam in Turkish Berlin. He works as the Assistant Curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. In addition to his dissertation research, he is currently working on a series of short documentary films about instrument-makers. He is… Read more »
Ingrid won the Sonneck Society’s 1998 Irving Lowens Prize for the best book in American music for her 1996 Saying Something, Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. She was previously Associate Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, and also taught at University of Michigan, Harvard (as Visiting Professor) and University of Chicago. She has… Read more »
Rehding spent many years at the other Cambridge (BA, MA, MPhil, PhD) and held research fellowships at Emmanuel College Cambridge, the Penn Humanities Forum and the Princeton Society of Fellows before joining the Harvard Department in 2003, initially as Assistant Professor. Rehding was co-editor of Acta musicologica 2006-2011, and is Editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbook… Read more »
Sindhu works on the music of 19th and 20th century France, with particular attention to musical modernism. Her current book project, Sounding Empire in fin-de-siècle France: Exoticism, Nationalism, and Modernist Musical Thought, examines the exoticist representation and nationalism in music and situates them both in the context of French imperial aspirations and the beginnings of… Read more »
Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded and ran the Stanford Humanities Lab between 1999 and 2010. A cultural historian with research interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent books are The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), Digital_Humanities (MIT Press,… Read more »
