Event Description
Join the Drexel Department of History to welcome Alexandra Hui,
PhD, an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, who
will present “Sensing Against the Archive for Silence, Stillness, and
Stuck-ness” as part of our speaker series on May 25. Professor Hui’s research
examines the co-development of listening and background music technology and
how scientists listen to the environment.
Historians have much to learn
from stopped time. Examining the sensation, perception, and documentation of
stasis opens categorical and ontological questions about how change is
determined. Through a series of case studies of scholarly and lay
understandings of silence, Professor Hui reflects on the role of stillness in
history. Hui offers a new approach to studying past human relationships with
nature by focusing on actual sounds and listening practices.
Hui is co-editor of Isis, the History of Science Society journal. Her
monograph, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds,
1840–1910 (MIT Press, 2012), several articles, and her co-edited book, Testing
Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford University Press, 2020), focus
on music, sound, and the laboratory. |
