Anna Kvíčalová graduated in religion studies in Brno (MU), Amsterdam (UvA) and Berlin (FU), where she graduated with a dissertation on hearing and media communication in early modern Calvinism (awarded the summa cum laude). Between 2013-17, she worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (within the projects Making the Acoustics in the 16th to 19th Century Europe and the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics). She is a member of the Berlin Center for the History of Epistemology and Material Culture (Knowledge in Motion) and is engaged in interdisciplinary research into the history of senses, media, science and religion in early modern Europe. Her current research project follows the construction of the deafness category and the changing definition of proper hearing and sound in 16th and 17th century Europe.


Manufacturing Nature? How To Do Things With Sounds In The Anthropocene

The paper will examine how the sounds of nature, both imaged, re-created and recorded, helped to reinforce a specific notion of nature in opposition to human culture and industrialization. The discussion shall be framed by contemporary debates about the „Anthropocene“, which is approached not only as a new geological, environmental and cultural-historical epoch, but also as a specific perspective, a new way how scientists, scholars, artists and different publics look at the world and describe it. In the debates about the Anthropocene, the modern binary distinctions between the natural and the cultural, subjects and objects, and sciences and the humanities, are being effectively reconsidered.