John Picker (jpicker@mit.edu)

John Picker teaches courses in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century media and literature. His interests include Victorian and transatlantic studies, auditory culture, and media history. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes. (Read more about the book in a blog entry at The Paris Review.) He is also a contributor to The Sound Studies Reader, The Auditory Culture Reader, Sound Studies in the series Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. His essay "Two National Anthems" was published in A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, which was on several best-of-the-year lists (Salon, NPR, Time Out New York, Boston Phoenix). His other writing includes chapters in Sounds of Modern History, The Victorian World, Walt Whitman and Modern Music, and Shakespearean Criticism, and articles in The American Scholar, New Literary History, ELH, and Victorian Studies. He is a member of the editorial board of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which began publication with Routledge in 2016. He has been invited to speak on such topics as "AL, or Artificial Listening" at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, "His Monster's Voice" at the Stanford Humanities Center, "The Telephone Booth, Noise, and Public Privacy" at the Yale School of Architecture, "Reading the Atlantic Cable" at University College Dublin, "Auditory Anxieties and Modernity" at the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences, "Transatlantic Acousmatics" at MIT's Comparative Media Studies colloquium, and London street cries for the Modern Language Association's "What's the Word?" radio series. He can be seen and heard in "The Whole Wired World" from Wired: A World Transformed by the Telegraph, a recent exhibit at the Maihaugan Gallery at MIT. He and his wife live in Cambridge with their son and daughter.