VCU's College of Humanities and Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Mary Caton Lingold, Ph.D., to the position of director of the Media, Art and Text (MATX) program. The MATX program is an interdisciplinary doctoral program between the Department of English, the Robertson School of Media and Culture, and the School of the Arts, and is housed in the College of Humanities and Sciences. Lingold will begin her new position on July 1, and her office will be in the Valentine House (920 W. Franklin St.).
Lingold is an associate professor of English and has been at VCU since 2017. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the crossroads between literature, cultural history and performance. With specialties in the early modern African Atlantic world, slavery, and colonial British America, she also publishes in the fields of sound studies, digital humanities and music.
Lingold’s forthcoming book, "African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery" (UVA Press), explores the musical lives of Atlantic Africans during the rise of plantation slavery and argues that it is through listening, and by thinking about sound, that the broader history of music and slavery can best be understood, will be released this fall.
Lingold also co-edited the volume "Digital Sound Studies" (Duke 2018), as well as articles in journals such as Early Music, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Early American Literature. She has produced a number of digital projects as well, including the website Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica, a database of sound recordings called the Sonic Dictionary, and a podcast about a song by an enslaved woman named Tena.
Before earning a Ph.D. in English and a graduate certificate in African & African American Studies from Duke University in 2017, Lingold earned an M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a B.A. from Trinity University in Texas.
We’d like to thank Oliver Speck, Ph.D., from the School of World Studies for his leadership of the MATX program during the past four years. Thank you!