Harry Burson

(Residential Fellow, 2020-21)

Harry Burson

Residential Fellow

The World in Stereo: Sound, Space, and Immersion, 1879-1959

Harry Burson is a PhD candidate in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at UC Berkeley. He works in the areas of film and media theory, sound studies, and media archaeology. His dissertation, “The World in Stereo: Sound, Space, and Immersion, 1879-1959,” examines the emergence of stereophonic sound in terms of its potential to produce new forms of acoustic space and aural perspective through multi-speaker audio. The project explores how stereo reshapes understandings of space and spatiality that suffuse the contemporary global media environment. 

At Berkeley, he co-organized the conferences Medium/Environment and High/Low: Taste, Quality, and Resolution in Film and Media. He also was an organizer of the Unintelligible: Noise Against Capture Conference at UC Santa Cruz as a founding member of the University of California Humanities Research Institute “Critical Research in Sound Studies” Working Group. He currently co-runs the Townsend Center working group on Sound Studies at Berkeley.