Margaret McCurry
Ph.D. Candidate, New York University
Voices without bodies; bodies without voices: these reciprocal figures unsettle the apparent coincidence of vocal sound and embodied presence. My scholarship investigates the vocal metaphysics of presence at work in premodern England through a practice of aural reading that brings the sound of language into relation with the language of sound. Drawing premodern theories and practices of voice into conversation with sound studies and disability studies, I argue that these figures make the conditions of vocal presence available to literary interpretation, exposing difficulties that persist even where voice and body appear to coincide.
Margaret McCurry (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at New York University, where she will defend her dissertation in April 2027. Her scholarship approaches late medieval and early modern English literature through sound studies and disability studies, with particular emphasis on the philosophy of voice. Drawing on premodern and contemporary accounts of perception, embodiment, and mediation, she examines how literary representations of vocality both reflect and shape the cultural traditions from which they emerge.