EIHS Lecture: Stillness, Stuck-ness, and Sensing Against the Archive

Historians have much to learn from stopped time. Examining the sensation, perception, and documentation of stasis opens up categorical and ontological questions about how change is determined. Through a series of case studies of scholarly- and lay-understandings of silence, Professor Hui will reflect on the role of stillness in history. Related, she will consider how the phenomenology of delay informs our understanding of the practices and infrastructures of science. Documentation, from diaries to lab protocols, both simulates simultaneity and the affective experience of delay, prompting consideration of where slowness can be found in the historical record, challenging the very practice of history.

Alexandra Hui is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She received her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2008. She has also published several scholarly articles and chapters in anthologies, and coedited the 2013 Osiris volume on music, sound, and the laboratory. Her monograph, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (MIT Press, 2012), explores the relationship between psychophysical studies of sound sensation and music culture. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.