Alexandra Hui is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, head of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine there, and one of the core faculty of its Center for the History of Agriculture, Science, and the Environment in the South (CHASES). She received her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2008. She has also published several scholarly articles and chapters in anthologies, and coedited the 2013 Osiris volume on music, sound, and the laboratory. Her monograph, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (MIT Press, 2012), explores the relationship between psychophysical studies of sound sensation and music culture. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is currently working on two research projects. The first examines the co-development of new listening forms and background music technology in twentieth-century America. The second project is a comparative study of how field scientists listened to the environment in Germany and the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
RCC Research Project: Listening to Nature: Standardized Soundscapes and Imagined Ecologies, 1900–2000
Selected Publicaitons:
- “The Naturalization of Timbre: Two Case Studies.” In Oxford Handbook of Timbre, edited by Emily Dolan and Alexander Rehding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018.
- “Walter Bingham und die Universalisierung des individuellen Hörers.” In Wissensgeschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by Netzwerk Hör-Wissen im Wandel, coordinated by Daniel Morat, 41–64. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017.
- “Aural Rights and Early Environmental Ethics: Negotiating the Post-War Soundscape.” In Current Directions in Ecomusicology: A Field Guide, edited by Aaron Allen and Kevin Dawes, 176–87. UK: Routledge, 2016.
- “‘Muzak-While-You-Work’: Programming Music for Industry, 1919–1948.” Historische Anthropologie 22, no. 3 (2014): 364–83.
- with Julia Kursell and Myles Jackson. “Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750–1980.” Osiris 28 (January 2013): 1–11.
- The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.