Past Events

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Nov. 15, 2023

Student Research Symposium

Students presented their research in interdisciplinary voice studies on various topics, including deep fakes, whale song, tourism, KPop, linguistics, Dante and opera, and queer voices in popular culture. Attendees engaged with the posters, listened to short presentations, and asked questions about the students’ topics.

Keynote Presentation

Renée Altergott on “Reading Against the Grain of the Voice: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary”

In Gustave Flaubert’s own words, each sentence in Madame Bovary (1857) was put through the ultimate test of his “gueuloir,” a nickname for his private study that was derived from the vulgar verb “gueuler” (to bellow, holler). Using a genetic approach, this talk considers the drafts of Madame Bovary as if they were visual scores to be performed out loud. Inspired by Salomo Friedländer’s imaginative use of Goethe’s larynx to filter and resound the echoes of his voice lingering in his study in Weimar, we will listen to a polyphonic chorus of male voices bring Flaubert’s relentless, guttural act of literary creation to life—back through the gueuloir.

Renée Altergott is a visiting assistant professor of French at Wabash College in Indiana. She completed her Ph.D. in French and Francophone Literature at Princeton University in 2022. Her work examines the cultural and literary history of sound recording in France and the former French Colonial Empire. Recent publications on sound, technology, and colonialism have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, French Forum, and Contemporary French Civilization Intersections.