Margaret McCurry
Ph.D. Candidate, New York University
Voices without bodies; bodies without voices: these reciprocal ruptures reverberate through the literature of late-medieval England, exposing the instability of sensory hierarchies long believed to guarantee metaphysical presence. My scholarship theorizes this instability through two mutually constitutive modes: vocal presence in the absence of the body and vocal absence in the presence of a body. Drawing together theological and philosophical accounts of signification and mediation with approaches from sound studies and disability studies, my work reconceptualizes voice not as an acoustic artifact but as a metaphysical condition in which revelation—whether eschatological or hermeneutic—is mediated through absence, deferral, and obscurity.
Margaret McCurry (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at New York University. Fascinated by the moments when words fail to fully capture or articulate meaning, her scholarship integrates theological and philosophical theories of signification and mediation with approaches from sound studies and disability studies to analyze the literature of thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century England. Her dissertation, “Vox in Absentia: Disembodied Vocality Late Medieval English Literature,” examines how disembodied voices in medieval texts destabilize the metaphysics of presence, exposing a hermeneutic rupture where sound is severed from its source.