In December 2024, the Modern Language Association recognized Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry Postdoctoral Fellow Alex Ullman with an honorable mention during its announcement of the William Riley Parker Prize for outstanding article published in PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship. Ullman, based in the Center for the Humanities, earned the kudos for his article “Audre Lorde, Sound Theorist: Register, Silence, Vibrato, Timbre,” published in the October 2024 issue.
The award committee’s citation reads:
“Restoring Audre Lorde’s poetry and prose to its performed contexts, Alex Ullman’s essay listens anew to the sound of Lorde’s voice. Ullman uses newly developed digital tools to analyze the tonal qualities and prosodic measures of Lorde’s own vocalizations of her work, thus discovering a semantics of the auditory that is part and parcel of Lorde’s poetics and showing Lorde to be a significant theorist of the medium of sound. Ullman’s careful attention to the dynamics of sound and performance offers us new ways to hear Lorde within the Black Arts movement and the social and political worlds she inhabited. As an exemplary demonstration of what technology can make possible for humanities practice, this study opens new doors for future studies of poetry in performance and many other corpora.”
Alex Ullman, a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century American literature and performance studies, joined the Center for the Humanities in August 2024 for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the Mellon-funded program Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry. During his fellowship, he is working with Paige McGinley, associate professor of performing arts, on a book based on his dissertation, “This Feeling Tone: The Performance of Black and Jewish Conversation.”
