Dr Henry Ivry
Environmental Humanities Fellow, 2024
Home Institution: University of Glasgow
Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research explores how climate and racial justice are two sides of the same coin. To imagine a more sustainable world requires building a more equitable one and Henry's research looks at how various facets of African American culture and thought form a vital archive for building otherwise worlds. His first book Transscalar Critique: Climate, Blackness, Crisis was published by Edinburgh UP in 2023 and his academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and English Language Notes. Henry also works regularly as a freelance music journalist with bylines in Resident Advisor, DJ Mag, Bandcamp Daily, and Beatportal.
Project title: Sonic Infrastructures and the Ecology of Sound
My IASH project is built around a central question: can we listen to the joint crises of anthropogenic climate change and racialized violence? This work asks what kind of approaches, insights, and/or unexpected politics emerge from sound for cultural scholars of ecology. My research takes these provocations as its starting point to develop a tentative and exploratory ecology of sound. In this way, I follow recent scholarship in sound studies has attempted to address what Gustavus Stadler terms the “underlying whiteness” of the field, foregrounding how the settled vocabulary of the discipline presupposes a particular kind of racialized listening subject. This project models and articulates a critical mode that that I describe as insurgent listening.