About the Lecture: In this talk, Professor Cornish uses the Chernobyl disaster as a starting point to set sound studies into dialogue with the “deep history” of radiation and nuclear arms testing in the twentieth century. Weaving together archival documents, oral history, and artistic examples, Cornish argues that scientists, musicians, and government bureaucrats alike turned to sounds—not visuals—to measure and better understand the atom’s potential in the Soviet Union and United States. She positions radiation as a “hyperobject” (Morton 2013): an object that is so vast and immeasurable that it defies interpretation. As something both incomprehensible in scope and invisible to the human eye, radiation intersects with audile techniques in ways that help to illuminate changing epistemologies and political ecologies during the Cold War. Ultimately, this lecture asks what listening to Chernobyl can teach us about our tenuous atomic present and ever-encroaching nuclear futures.
About the Speaker: Gabrielle Cornish is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her research explores listening cultures and political ideologies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, and the Slavic Review, and she has bylines in Slate, the Washington Post, and The New York Times. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from ASEEES, the American Musicological Society, and Fulbright. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.