Graduate Panel on Sound in the Humanities

Stephen Sansom, “Sound and Oral Poetics in the Shield of Heracles”

This investigation into the Shield's figuration of sound not only counterbalances the scholarship on the poem's visual aesthetic; it also better identifies the poem's unique attention to sound and its place in the oral tradition of Greek hexameter poetry.

Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke, "Sonic Semantics & Sonorous Somatics: Jacob Böhme's Aural Ontology"

My current multimedia project, The Stormwatcher is a creative translation the "textural" elements of Böhme's texts into a contemporary idiom. Conceived in tandem with my dissertation research, The Stormwatcher is a shadow to the enlightenment project of scholarship. The merging of practices—both inscriptive and transmissional—hold a mirror to each other, presenting an opportunity to reflect upon the legitimacy and limitations of each mode of meaning production.

Jeremy Calder, “Sound and Body in Meaning-Making: Dressing High-Frequency /s/ in Drag”

This paper is an exploration of the semiotic relations between sound and visual, focusing on the pronunciation of /s/ in the drag scene of SoMa, San Francisco. I argue that, because the body itself is loaded with gendered meaning, the visual context in which language is embedded serves to either enhance or restrict the semiotic potential of linguistic sound. SoMa queens recruit visual material in order to direct the indexical potential of their linguistic performances.