Holden Carroll MA

PhD candidate

Area(s) of interest: Digital Humanities, Modern & Contemporary History, Sound History

Cohort/Start PhD: 2023-2024

Tuning into the United Nations Radio Archive, 1946–1989 [provisional title]

University of Amsterdam
Overarching project: Sound Affairs: Sonic Histories of Foreign Relations, 1700–1990
Supervisors: Houssine Alloul, Melvin Wevers, and Josephine Hoegaerts
Starting date: February 2024

My project centers experimentation with burgeoning digital techniques that facilitate a synthesis of sound studies and international history. I provisionally propose an examination of the unique and largely ignored radio archive of the United Nations (UN). What can the UN’s radio archive reveal about this pivotal organization’s self-broadcasted role in defining (and revising) narratives around the international order, ‘post’-coloniality, and state creation during its first decades? The approach of sound studies helps me to foreground the entire sonic context (including tone of voice, silences, variations in amplitude) of archived sound recordings as epistemically relevant. I will use a multi-modal set of digital history techniques (e.g. text processing, waveform analysis, speaker annotation) to analyze and interpret the data. I also intend to present parts of my research online in an interactive and publicly accessible format.