Naomi Waltham-Smith

Naomi Waltham-Smith is a theorist of sound and listening. In her research and creative projects, she is interested in how music and sound are implicated in some of the most significant and urgent political issues in our world today.

Waltham-Smith is currently finishing a second monograph, The Sound of Biopolitics, under contract with Fordham University Press for the Commonalities series. Staging a confrontation between Derrida and Agamben, his speculative study traces how sound has been caught up in philosophy’s attempts to theorize the politics of sovereignty and shows how a focus on aurality sheds new light on the debates between deconstruction and theories of biopolitics. Other work on philosophies of listening is published in boundary 2, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, and The Oxford Handbook of Timbre and Orchestration; an article on “Agamben’s Museicology” is forthcoming in The New Centennial Review. 

Her recent work, supported by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, deploys a creative praxis of field recording and soundmapping to investigate urban sound ecologies and the conditions of aurality under neoliberalism and with the rise of right populisms. This work includes an analysis of psychotechnologies of listening on the Vegas Strip (forthcoming in Sound Studies), a study of the sound of precarity in the Parisian banlieues, a collaboration with photographer Alessandro Zanoni documenting the sights and sound of China’s urban villages, and investigations into practices of sound activism. She is also building a sound archive Listening under global Trumpsim that gathers together field recordings from cities around the globe and will be hosted by the Slought Foundation; some of her recent fieldwork in Paris is presented in a podcast for Sounding Out! Waltham-Smith has been awarded a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude to continue her work on urban soundscapes with a project entitled “Cart-otographies of Cities: Soundmapping Urban Political Economies.”