Elizabeth Micaković

Staging American Sounds

"Modernist Laboratories" (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

"Efface the Traces!", University of Durham

Received a full bursary from the University of Durham to deliver a paper on Eliot and Copyright, entitled '“Where will the word resound?” T. S. Eliot and the Ownership of the Voice'. This paper examined the metadiscursive approach adopted by Eliot to interrogate the symbiotic, though volatile, relationship between Modernism and copyright law in a series of BBC lectures on Tudor prose.

The T. S. Eliot Society Annual Conference

“T. S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice” (St Louis, Missouri)

This paper investigates the entrenched concerns Eliot had regarding the proprietorship of his voice. By drawing on materials from the BBC Archives, my paper charts Eliot’s struggle to retain control of the reception and dissemination of his broadcast voice. The paper further considers the extent to which Eliot sought to situate his voice, which, when released on the air, threatened to resist any claim to ownership, outside of radio’s inherent predisposition to reproduction by inscribing it into a system of regulation reserved for the printed word.

The T. S. Eliot Society Annual Conference

Purifying the Dialect of the Tribe: T. S. Eliot and the ‘“Amurrican” Language’ (St Louis, Missouri)

Drawing on archival research conducted at the University of Columbia (NY), this paper suggests that Eliot’s concerns with the literal ‘transmission’ of culture were closely bound up with (anxiety-laden) discourses on linguistic purity in early twentieth-century America, discourses which played themselves out in mass print media, educational curricula, and, crucially, on the radio and in public performance.

British Society for Literature and Science

“Wireless English: T. S. Eliot and the invisible paragons of English speech.” (University of Oxford)

This paper argues how technologies of voice reproduction, particularly the radio and the phonograph, were not only instrumental in the promulgation of a standard English posited the BBC, but also that such technologies revealed and heightened the anxiety felt by Eliot regarding the fallibility of the poet’s speaking voice. This paper considers how Eliot's early anxieties over technology's interference in the pure transmission of voice were explored in Sweeney Agonistes, most prominently through the use of the telephone, which became a recurring metonymical object in his later plays.

Moving Modernisms Interdisciplinary Conference

“’Where Will the Word Resound?’: T. S. Eliot and the Shifting Dialects of his Tribe” (University of Oxford)

Detailing Eliot's participating in a 1933 phonetics project, this paper sought to demonstrate Eliot's sustained interest in philology and the physiology of the voice, one which became more pronounced as his public speaking career flourished. I situate Eliot’s work within a wider contextual concern amongst American linguists, in the face of technologies voice reproduction, to preserve American dialects.

BAMS New Work in Modernist Studies

“’Tortured by verbiage’: T. S. Eliot and the Crisis of Language” (Institute of English Studies, London)

This paper explores the degree to which Eliot was conversant with Pierre Janet's work on non-organic causes of mutism and speech disorders.

Strange New Today: Victorians, Crisis and Response

“The Electric Cure: Electricity, Medicine and the Silent Treatment,” (University of Exeter, Devon)

This paper documented how medical discourse on trauma-induced speech disorders, including aphonia and mutism, ran concurrent to, and became entangled in, philosophical and Modernist discourses on ineffability.

T. S. Eliot Summer School

AHRC Doctoral Award

Fees and £13,590 maintenance

University of Exeter Doctoral Fee Bursary

Fees and £3500 maintenance.

AHRC Researcher Development Award

Awarded £3500 to fund archival research at Columbia University and the New York Public Library.

Fathman Young Scholar Award

$500 award for my paper, "T. S. Eliot and the Politics of the Voice", delivered at the 2012 T. S. Eliot Society Conference (St Louis, Missouri).