COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Neil Verma is assistant professor of sound studies in Radio/TV/Film. He serves as core faculty in Comparative Literary Studies, associate director of the MA in Sound Arts and Industries, and on the Executive Committee of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama. Verma’s work focuses on the intersection of sound and narrative, and he specializes in radio drama and audio fiction. He is author of Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago, 2012), which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-editor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (California, 2016), which won the Kraszna-Krausz best Moving Image Book Award. Recently Verma co-edited Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (Michigan, 2020) and a special issue of [In]Transition on emerging forms of audiographic criticism. He has published articles on topics from film noir to podcast studies in such journals as Critical Quarterly, Participations, and Velvet Light Trap. In 2017, he was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop digital tools for analyzing vocal texts. Verma also has a practice in experimental recording. His works have been selected for several radio art festivals and he recently directed American Bottom, a new work of audio fiction, for A Red Orchid Theatre. Verma founded the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies, serves on the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, and is Editor of the RadioDoc Review. In 2021 he was elected to the SCMS Board of Directors for a three-year term.