Welcome to Audiovisualities, the newest “Humanities Laboratory” at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute!

Jointly directed by Guo-Juin Hong (Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture; Interim Director, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image) and Jacqueline Waeber (Associate Professor of Music), Audiovisualities will be launching officially in Fall 2013. Through projects, classes, workshops, and other programs, the Lab aims to provide a structure for encouraging teaching and research in the booming field of sound studies, complementing and challenging the existing primacy of visual studies. By situating sound studies and visual studies together, this Humanities Lab engages with film theories and moving image practices, musicology and ethnomusicology, media studies, literature, philosophy and history, cultural anthropology, as well as cognitive psychology and neuroscience, ecology and environmental studies—to name just a few. The Lab’s ambition is to lay the grounds for future studies and practices that understand image and sound together as two major sensoria whose interconnected and sometimes contentious relationships shed new light on human experience. To learn more, please visit our “About” page.

In keeping with the mission of the Humanities Labs, the Audiovisualities Lab is eager to work with faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across the disciplines at Duke. We will be sharing more details about the Lab’s projects and future plans between now and the Fall 2013. If you’d like to sign up for the Lab’s mailing list, please send a request here.