Axel Volmar

I am a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. I am also a member of the international research network “Auditory Knowledge in Transition: An Epistemic History of Listening in Modernity” funded by the German Research Foundation. I have co-edited several collected volumes on auditory media culture and on technology and temporality. My current research focuses on the history of scientific listening and explores the relationship between data, media technologies and the senses within the auditory culture of science after 1800. I am especially interested in why and how listening skills, together with acoustic instruments and audio technologies, were cultivated in order to produce and assess scientific research data. In my project, I am looking into a number of cases from a diverse set of scientific disciplines, such as medicine (stethoscope), military psychology (sound ranging and sonar technology), or nuclear physics (Geiger counter).