Neil Verma

United States (residence) °1978
en

Neil Verma is Harper fellow and collegiate assistant professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he teaches media aesthetics. His book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics and American Radio Drama (University of Chicago Press, 2012) won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of American Studies, The RadioDoc Review, Velvet Light Trap and Critical Quarterly. Verma is co-curator of From Mercury To Mars, a web series on the radio dramas of Orson Welles on Sounding Out!: the Sound Studies Blog, where he also serves as Special Editor. Currently, he is working on an edited volume on Norman Corwin and sound authorship, as well as a monograph on new audio. He will soon be taking a post as visiting assistant professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University.

research

research expositions

  • A Paleontology of Quiet (2014) author(s): Neil Verma published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    This paper considers “close listening” in the context of classic America radio drama through a study of “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” a radio play by Wyllis Cooper. Although it is among the most esteemed works of dramatic audio in U.S. popular culture, the piece has seldom been engaged critically. Doing “readings” of radio drama is a rare activity to begin with, and this play is especially elusive because its features exceed the common preoccupations of theory of radio dramatic technique. Following Jonathan Sterne’s proposal to blend “sonic imaginations” with other fields of thought and practice, I take a new approach, heeding Cooper’s odd “geological” aesthetic and arguing that the play offers an idea of “auditory fossilization.” Building on some of my earlier work that considers classic radio drama as a mineralized transmission, I further propose the “sound fossil” as a heuristic to help us conceptualize the form as a whole as it exists in our time. This nearly extinct yet modern genre has always been a kind of objet sonore, surely, inasmuch as it occupies a “theater of the mind” whose pleasure rests on a disavowal of its own production, but radio drama is also increasingly a sonorous “thing,” defined by glitches and errors in the preserved audio that point toward a struggle against – and requirement of – materiality. According to this model, to critically engage with a recorded drama is to unearth these two underground counterpressures, and close listening is both a mode of reading and one of excavation.
     open exposition comments (0)