about

This blog is the brainchild of post-conference withdrawal. The 2011 University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Conference on sound—"Sound and Unsound: Noise, Nonsense, and the Unspoken"—produced a space for open, interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration that is rarer in contemporary academia than we'd like to admit. Rather than lament this rarity, however, we have decided to rise to the challenge of creating and growing a constant reminder of the community we exist in, a community grounded in forms of listening. We want a place to share ideas and offer suggestions, stay informed about research, talk about experiences with art/music/literature, and make new connections. Such things are relevant not merely to our individual career trajectories, but also, and perhaps far more importantly, to changing the shape of academic interaction, to closing the gap between criticism and practice, and allowing our voices to sound in more arenas, with less fear.

Before the end of the year, we seek to launch an intercoastal (inter-national), sound-revolutionary website for scholars that can serve as both a social space and a space for research. This site will include student profiles, discussion forums, communally annotated bibliogra-phies, book reviews, and a collaborative performing arts blog. As we are working to get the site underway, however, we do not want to lose touch with the community we are building it for. The blog you see here is our effort to maintain, in the interim, the connections we've made, and to fuel them as best we can with ongoing interaction.

In her short response to Marjorie Perloff's call for a return to sound in studies of contemporary lyric poetry, Yopie Prins suggested that the only way to perform a responsible critique of sound and text would be to assemble an international team of scholars across all fields and disciplines, all working simultaneously, even contradictorily, to contribute to a fuller picture of what sound and text might mean (what each has meant throughout history, how each has been perceived, both separately and in tandem). As tremendous as Prins's vision might seem, we see no reason why it should remain mere idealism. If you care about sound and it suffuses your work, whether scholarly, artistically, or otherwise, we hope you will join us in our endeavor, lend us your voices, thoughts, and ideas.

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Most of our authors can be individually contacted through their profiles. If you have general comments or inquiries, or would like to be added as an author for the blog, simply e-mail us at the following address: soundsunsound@gmail.com