Registration
Delegates are now invited to register for Ear Pieces. There are 2 packages on offer, both for early-career and senior researchers, and for PhD candidates.
‘Full’ registration includes, in both cases, buffet lunches on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th, tea and coffee throughout the conference, and a three-course dinner in the historic setting of Trinity Hall College on the night of Friday 16th.
‘Half’ registration includes the buffet lunches and refreshment, but does not include the conference dinner.
Early-career and Senior Researchers
Full Registration: £45
Half Registration: £35
PhD Candidates
Full Registration: £35
Half Registration: £25
To register, please follow this link
For more information, about registration or about the programme which is to follow shortly, please contact Dr Edward Allen: ejfa2@cam.ac.uk
The Brief
Ears Pieces is a new interdisciplinary venture, hosted by the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and funded by the Wellcome Trust. Building on the latest research undertaken in the environs of sound studies, it is the first initiative of its kind to assess the mutual legibility of medical and literary records, and so to kindle a dialogue between specialists from the humanities, neuroscience, and clinical medicine. One aim of Ear Pieces is to illuminate, in the course of discussion, the definitional contours of harmful listening in the last 200 years, from colloquial strains of otitis – ‘glue ear’ and ‘swimmer’s ear’ – to peripheral kinds of hearing loss, impairment and excess, such as otosis, sound-blindness, melomania, and Involuntary Musical Imagery. How have such complaints been understood historically? Whose vocabulary are we drawing on when we speak of neurotological trauma? In what ways, and to what ends, have poets, novelists, and musicians addressed the challenges and opportunities of representing sonic modernity?
Over the course of 2 days in December 2016, a diverse group of listeners will meet in Cambridge to discuss some of these questions. In doing so, our aim is to excavate the parallel histories of otology and the humanities, broadly conceived, to evaluate their intersections and points of resistance, and to gauge their present affinities, in public policy and the popular imagination.
