The Difference Accent Makes

Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, where she teaches courses on film, literature, and sound, with a South Asian focus. Her monograph Listening with a Feminist Ear (University of Michigan Press, 2023) was long-listed for the Kraszna-Krausz award and won honorable mention for the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies. She also co-edited Thinking with an Accent (University of California Press, 2023), winner of the ACLA René Wellek Prize.

Barbara Zecchi is  Professor and Director of the Film Studies Program at the Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst. With a focus on feminist film theory and aging studies,  she has published over hundred articles, and she is the author, or (co)editor of 11 volumes, including Women out of focus (Icaria 2014) and Gender-based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas (Routledge 2021).  A prolific video-essayist, her work has been featured in the Sight and Sound ‘Best Video Essay’ polls since 2021. 

Milan Reynolds is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is finishing a dissertation about magnetic tape’s influence on music, literature, and social movements in Italy and Chile, connecting listening practices to questions of political subjectivity and agency.

Praseeda Gopinath is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, New York. She is the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (Virginia, 2013) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature (2024). She has published widely in masculinity studies, postcolonial literature, twentieth-century British literature, sound, and film studies. She is writing a book on representations of vernacular masculinities in India.

Vijay Ramjattan is a teaching-stream assistant professor in language and literacies education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. His teaching and research interests generally pertain to the intersections of language, race, and work in the context of education. He is the author of Workable Accents: How International Teaching Assistants Vocally Fashion and Contest Academic Labor, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Laura Brueck is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, where she also directs the Kaplan Humanities Institute. She is the author of "Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature," the translator of "Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria" and the co-editor of multiple volumes, most recently, with Praseeda Gopinath, of The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literatures.

Junting Huang is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, SUNY. His research explores Chinese/Sinophone literature, art, cinema, and media, with interests in sound studies, new media studies, and environmental studies. He examines how media technologies shape spatial-political relations across borders, migration, diaspora, and indigeneity. His work has appeared in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, ASAP/Journal, among others.

Emma Herndon is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on sound in modern transatlantic literature, with an emphasis on Irish and African American traditions.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. She is co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (2023), co-author of the epistolary memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once (2025), and author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025) and What is We? (2025). Her editorial work spans volumes on the legacies of 1990s theory, the fate of the postcolonial, the Asian Century, and pandemic fiction. 

Azra Ghandeharion is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Iran. Her research focuses on film studies, adaptation studies, Minority Studies, and the dialogue between West and East in contemporary Middle Eastern art and culture. Key areas of her work include 'Otherness' issues, philosophy, postcolonialism, media studies, body politics, and diaspora.
Email: [email protected]

I am an Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University's Underwood International College. I was previously Taylor Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University after receiving my PhD at Princeton. I recently co-edited special issues on "Canonical Pressures" for Germanic Review and "Sensing Migrant Romanticism" for Comparative Literature. I have published widely on listening to difference, cultural acoustics, aural philology, and aural cultural diversity.