Research
Vox in Absentia:
Disembodied Vocality in Late Medieval English Literature
Vox in Absentia: Disembodied Vocality in Late Medieval English Literature, explores disembodied vocality, a phenomenon I theorize as vox in absentia. Over the course of four chapters, I pursue the voices that reverberate through Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, ventriloquize prophetic speech in John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, linger after death in the purgatorial encounters of the anonymous Gast of Gy, and surge with ecstatic fervor in Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris. In these works, the vox in absentia provokes a hermeneutic rupture, a crisis of interpretation that disrupts an audience’s ability to assign stable meaning. By unveiling this dynamic, the project shows how the vox in absentia unsettles epistemic expectations, dismantles conventional structures of interpretive authority, and generates potent affective responses precisely because it makes manifest what is otherwise latent in all speech—that the link between voice and body is not inherent but contingent, mediated, and prone to slippage. In foregrounding the disjunction between sound and origin, the vox in absentia does not abolish presence so much as reveal the structural conditions that render it fundamentally unstable. Vox in Absentia advances scholarly discourse in medieval sound studies, theology, deconstruction, and hermeneutics, offering new ways to conceptualize literary authority and the metaphysics of presence in premodern thought. It also intervenes in contemporary debates about subjectivity by asking the humanistic question of what it means to apprehend a voice without a body.
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Echoes "Multiplyinge Ever Moo": Acousmatization and Dissemination in the House of Fame
Chapter One explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, showing how poetic form becomes an acoustic system in which iteration displaces authorial origin and transforms fame into a network of circulating echoes whose authority is always provisional. This chapter argues that Chaucer stages a poetics of acousmatic dissemination, revealing how voices detached from their sources destabilize interpretive authority and unsettle the metaphysics of presence.
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The Ventriloquized Vox: The Acousmatic Vox Clamantis
Chapter Two examines John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, investigating prophetic ventriloquism and fractured authorship to show how shifting voices expose the contingency of moral, political, and prophetic authority. Through close attention to Gower’s manipulation of biblical, classical, and plebeian voices, the chapter demonstrates how the text’s prophetic posture is produced through acousmatic instability rather than stable authorial embodiment.
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"A Voyce All Ane": Haunting Hermeneutics in the Gast of Gy
Chapter Three turns to the anonymous Gast of Gy, where the voice of a purgatorial spirit dramatizes hauntological and hermeneutic uncertainty, compelling listeners to navigate the fraught boundary between divine truth and demonic deception. The chapter argues that the Gast transforms purgatorial doctrine into an interpretive crisis, illustrating how unseen voices generate doctrinal doubt, devotional anxiety, and epistemological vertigo.
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The Unseen Cantor: Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris and the Acousmatic Resonance of Unio Mystica
Chapter Four analyzes Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris, in which mystical audition becomes a mode of divine resonance, allowing the soul to apprehend an unseen harmony rather than a visible God. This chapter contends that Rolle reconceptualizes mystical revelation as a sonic rather than visual phenomenon, locating divine immediacy in disembodied sound that transcends corporeal perception.
Vox in Absentia:
Embodied Muteness in Late Medieval English Literature
While my dissertation explores the presence of voice in the absence of a body, my second book-length project turns to the inverse phenomenon, the absence of voice in the presence of a body. Framed as the second half of a conceptual diptych, this companion volume will share the title Vox in Absentia, drawing attention to the capaciousness of the Latin phrase, which identifies a voice apprehended under the condition of absence without specifying what is absent. Whereas the first volume theorizes disembodied vocality, the second turns to embodied muteness: bodies that are physically present yet deprived of voice. In late-medieval English literature, muteness—whether physical or voluntary—demonstrates vocal expression is never guaranteed but always contingent and shaped by systems of mediation. By foregrounding figures who cannot or will not speak, this project draws attention to the thresholds where speech is expected but withheld, shifting interpretive emphasis from what is said to the conditions that render speech possible—or impossible—in the first place.