Listening to the Mind: Tracing the Auditory History of Mental Illness in Archives and Exhibitions

Carolyn Birdsall is Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. Her monograph, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2012. Her current work investigates the early history of radio archiving and emergent concepts of “documentary sound” in interwar European media culture.

Manon Parry is Assistant Professor of Public History, University of Amsterdam. She has curated exhibitions on global health and human rights, disability in the American Civil War, and medicinal and recreational drug use. She is the author of Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning (Rutgers University Press, 2013).

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Assistant Professor of Arts and New Media, University of Amsterdam, and the director of a research group on the history of acoustics at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her new project is entitled “The Past in the Ear: A History of Auditory Memory.”