English Language and Literature Commons^™

Queering The Ear: Podcast Aesthetics And The Embodied Archive In S-Town, Kira Schukar

English Honors Projects

Despite podcasts’ rising popularity over the last twenty years, literary scholars are only beginning to focus on their affective potential as multimedia texts. In this thesis, I argue that even mainstream podcasts are productively intertwined with queer theories and aesthetics of belonging. Using the 2017 podcast S-Town as my case study, I examine the aural aesthetics of queer failure, temporality, archives, embodiment, and desire as key elements in this complex medium. Putting these theories and aesthetics into practice, I describe my process of research-creation and present a podcast I made about my road trip to Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town’s place …

Invisible In 'The Archive': Librarians, Archivists, And The Caswell Test, Bridget Whearty

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric Faculty Scholarship

This presentation, "Invisible in 'The Archive': Archivists, Librarians, and The Caswell Test," was given at the 53rd International Congress for Medieval Studies, on May 11, 2018. It argues that medievalists, and humanities scholars more broadly, have erred in writing and theorizing about "the archive" as an abstract, depopulated space, untouched by human labor and laborers. Building on the work of M. L. Caswell, Eira Tansey, Amy Hildreth Chen, Myron Groover, and other scholars of library and information sciences, it proposes that humanities scholars adopt what I call "The Caswell Test."

Based on the famous "Bechdel Test" for gender representation in …