The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs

Joseph Straus

Joseph Straus is a music theorist specializing in music of the twentieth century, with research interests that include set theory, voice-leading in post-tonal music, the music of Stravinsky, and the music Ruth Crawford Seeger. His book, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, is a standard college textbook on this topic. His book Remaking the Past received the Wallace Berry award from the Society for Music Theory (SMT); Professor Straus was the President of the SMT from 1997-99. He is a Distinguished Professor of Music at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music.

David Rothenberg

ECM recording artist David Rothenberg has performed and recorded on clarinet with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Glen Velez, Elliot Sharp, Markus Reuter, and the Karnataka College of Percussion.  Most of work has an environmental theme and involves the sounds of nature, live and in the studio.  He has sixteen CDs out under his own name, including “On the Cliffs of the Heart,” named one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine and “One Dark Night I Left My Silent House,”  a duet album with pianist Marilyn Crispell, called “une petite miracle” by Le Monde and named by The Village Voice one of the ten best CDs of 2010.  Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing, book and CD, published in seven languages and the subject of a BBC television documentary.  He is also the author of numerous other books on music, art, and nature, including Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales, and Survival of the Beautiful, about aesthetics in evolution.  His book and CD Bug Music, featuring the sounds of the entomological world, has been featured on PBS News Hour and in the New Yorker.  His latest recordings are Cicada Dream Band, Cool Spring and Berlin Bülbül.  Rothenberg is distinguished professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

www.davidrothenberg.net

Christina Katopodis

Christina Katopodis is a doctoral candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation, “American Transcendentalism: Widening the Field of Search for Music,” examines the influence of sonic vibration and music on Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. Recipient of a Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant, she is concurrently working on a digital humanities project called The Walden Soundscape, building a website that features sound recordings from Walden Pond in all four seasons. She is a co-Chair of Better to Speak, a women adjunct advocacy group at the Graduate Center, and teaches at Hunter College. Author of her own pedagogy blog, she is also a guest blogger for Pedagogy & American Literary Studies, and a Twitter curator for We the Humanities.

Kaitlin Mondello

Kaitlin Mondello received her Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 2018. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center where she is the editor of the blog Visible Pedagogy (https://vp.commons.gc.cuny.edu). Her scholarship focuses on proto-environmentalist literature, science, and philosophy in the nineteenth century and their relevance to current debates about climate change and the Anthropocene. Her teaching and research interests include the Environmental Humanities and the intersections of race, gender, and animal studies. Within CUNY, she has taught at Hunter College and Guttman Community College. She also served as a WAC Fellow for the Environmental Justice Program at John Jay College and The School of Professional Studies at CUNY. She has been a Mellon Interdisciplinary Science Studies Fellow, a New York Botanical Garden Humanities Institute Fellow and an Early Research Initiative Fellow in Interdisciplinary Research in the Service of Public Knowledge. Her scholarly work has appeared in Romantic Ecocriticism and Essays in Romanticism. 

Lauren Bailey

Lauren Bailey is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. She teaches at Queens College where she is the Assistant to the Directors of the First Year Writing Program. Her dissertation examines the crossover between the gothic, inheritance plot, and global economy by examining the disruptive force of foreign objects in nineteenth-century British literature. In summer of 2016, she completed the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the History of Political Economy at Duke University. She also recently completed an archival research
fellowship at the New-York Historical Society.

Sophia Sunseri

Sophia Sunseri is a doctoral student in the English department at CUNY, where she studies representations of shyness and willful acts of self-exclusion in literary and cultural texts from the eighteenth century. She also holds a MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Poetry from the New School University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.