Mark Walters

Education

PhD Student (2008 Cohort): Communication & Science Studies, UCSD.       La Jolla, CA
MLIS, 2005: Library & Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.        Pittsburgh, PA
MA, 2003: English/Literary & Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University.            Pittsburgh, PA
BA, 2001: Comparative History of Ideas, University of Washington.                        Seattle, WA

UCSD Professional History:

Fall, 2008: Student Reader,
COSF 180:The Political Economy of Mass Media; Prof. Andrew Feldman

Pre-UCSD Professional History:
(Link to a more thorough CV here…)

Fall, 2008: Student Reader,

COSF 180:The Political Economy of Mass Media; Prof. Andrew Feldman

Summer II, 2009: Teaching Assistant,
COCU 100: Introduction to Communication & Culture; Prof. David Benin

Fall, 2009: Teaching Assistant,
COHI 100: Introduction to Communication & the Person; Prof. Barry Brown

Winter, 2010: Teaching Assistant,
COGN 20: Introduction to Communication; Prof. Patrick Anderson

Spring, 2010: Teaching Assistant,
COGN 20: Introduction to Communication; Prof. Boatema Boateng

Spring, 2010: Teaching Assistant,
COCU 108: Visual Culture; Prof. Lisa Cartwright

Summer II, 2010: Teaching Assistant,
COHI 100: Introduction to Communication & the Person; Prof. James Perez

Fall, 2010: Teaching Assistant,
COCU 130: Travel & Tourism; Prof. Michele Goldwasser

Research Interests:
I am interested in the cultural and technical history of music, sound and silence during the 19th and 20th centuries. My work looks at the ways that music and sound have been deployed as tools of political and military power. I also examine how notions of silence, noise and sound fidelity circulate within and between various cultural spheres-- artistic, scientific, technical, political and social-- as well as acoustical embodiment and trained listening practices.

Most recently, I am working with materials from the archives of the British Admiralty on the early history of U-Boat detection and anti-submarine warfare, as well as the capture and interrogation of five crew members of the German U-Boat U-64. I am also interested in James Traer's work on Passive Fathometers at the Scripps Marine Physical Laboratory.

Professional Background:
Before coming to UCSD, I was trained as a professional academic librarian. I worked for three years as a professional librarian at Georgetown College—a small, Baptist-affiliated liberal arts college just north of Lexington, KY. In that job, I was primarily responsible for cataloging books and other print materials, and for helping students with library research. I take tremendous pride in my teaching and greatly enjoy working with students, and still regularly assist undergraduates with planning, researching and writing papers.

Artistic Activities:
I am also a lifelong choral musician—I began singing with the Northwest Boychoir in Seattle in 1986, at the age of seven. Since then, I have sung with choirs at the University of Washington and the University of Pittsburgh, community choirs in Spokane, Pittsburgh, and Lexington, KY, as well as a number of opera companies throughout the country. Currently, I sing baritone with the La Jolla Symphony Chorus. I am also a charter member and Vice President Emeritus of UCSD Frequency All-Male a Capella.

Conference Presentations:

“Fencing music: did John Oswald’s Plunderphonic Signal a New Paradigm for Commercial Music in the Digital Age?”

@ Beyond the Centres: Musical Avant Gardes Since 1950. Thessaloniki, Greece. July, 2010

Publications:

When the Lights Go On Again: A Young Person's View of Life on the Home Front During WWII

This is a children’s novel I have co-authored with my mother, Margaret Walters. The novel is a fictionalized autobiography of my mother’s experiences as a young girl in Fresno, from late 1941 through late 1945. The novel is self-published through Authorhouse Publishers and is available via Amazon.com.

Detritus (A Few Works-in-Progress):

“Sound Bases: Sketches Toward an Examination of Musical Sense-Making”

Here, I begin to explore the ways in which feminist perspectives can complicate, re-define or otherwise inform our understandings of music, sound and audition. Hearing is a complex process that mediates the internal and the external, and implicates the body, the mind and the social world. For the purposes of this paper, I draw my case studies primarily from Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia.

“Subverted Sympathies: Subjectivity & Revolt in the Works of Poulenc, Cage and Camus”

In this paper, I examine three different works by three different authors—Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, John Cage’s 4’33”, and Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I hope to show how each work places itself in relation to contemporary understandings of the subject. More specifically, I hope to show that Dialogues can be understood as a performance of an ideologically-based, modern aesthetic tradition, whereas 4’33” and The Stranger can be understood as revolting against this tradition.

“Tears in the Waves: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, the Canticum Calamitatis Maritiamae, and the Aestheticization of Cultural Trauma”

Mäntyjärvi’s Canticum, an eight-part, a capella choral piece, was written in the aftermath of the Estonia ferry disaster of 2004. Mäntyjärvi splices Biblical texts and texts drawn from news reports of the event; his music mimics the sounds of foghorns and bells, screams and shearing metal, and funerary bagpipes. My paper addresses how Mäntyjärvi has used these musical and literary techniques to create a manifold, powerful cultural artifact that serves as a memorial to those who passed, and a source of hope to those who still grieve.

“Si(ng/gn)ing the Subject: Jacques Attali’s Noise and the History (and Future) of the Musical Commodity”

Drawing primarily from Attali’s masterwork—Noise: The Political Economy of Music—my paper attempts to trace the cultural use and economy of music in the Western tradition through four distinct historical periods, each tied to a unique technology of musical production and dissemination: Oral (prehistory- ca. 1500), Print (ca. 1500-1900), Recorded (ca. 1900-2000) and P2P (ca. 2000-). My goal is to provide a better understanding of the positioning of music as a commodity in each of these periods, in order to better understand the position of music vis-à-vis state and corporate regulation in the present day.

“Scrap’n’Art: West’s Day of the Locust, the Frankenstein Story in Print and Film, and Critiques of the Culture Industry from the Inside”

In this paper, I compare Nathanael West’s novella—The Day of the Locust—with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Whale’s 1931 film version of the Frankenstein story. Drawing from Frankfurt School critics, I show how West’s work can be understood as a vitrolic and very personal critique of the business of 1930’s Hollywood, written by someone who was, at the time, working as a Hollywood screenwriter.