Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 23.04.2025 ; 3 p.m.

This talk will outline the development and current trajectories in the field of historical sound studies, an interdisciplinary area of research dedicated to understanding how people heard and listened in the past. It will focus on newly emerging methods for interpreting the sounding past in written and recorded sound archives. It will also make the case for a public sound history which engages publics in new ways with critical historical listening activities.

James G. Mansell is Professor of Cultural History and Sound Studies in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is a specialist in the cultural history of sound and listening. He is the author of The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (2017) and co-editor of Negotiating Noise Across Spaces, Places and Disciplines (2021). He has collaborated with the Science Museum, London and the Science and Media Museum, Bradford, on a series of projects examining sound, listening, and history in museums, including the most recent project ‘Musical Affordances and Counterfactuals’ (2025) which experimented with a new form of ‘museum concert’ bringing the technological past to life via sound.