JNT Dialogue: Speaker Series
The JNT Dialogue is JNT’s annual speaker series. Each year, the JNT Dialogue invites keynote speakers to present on topics at the forefront of discourse about narrative theory. Previous Dialogue topics include “Detroit as a Narrative Space,” “Environmental Futures,” and “‘Stand Whose Ground?’ Indigeneity, Migrancy and Sovereignty.”
2026 JNT Dialogue
Hearing Voices: Reading, Race, and the Acoustic Imagination
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory Presents Dr. Julie Beth Napolin and Dr. Stephen M. Best as they try to answer this question: What role does the sonic imagination play in our reading experience? Is race something we are taught to listen for, not just see? Dr. Julie Beth Napolin and Dr. Stephen M. Best will explore the role of acoustics in the production and reception of narrative as they examine racial difference as a sonic trace in literature and consider how philosophies of listening produce alternative modes of reading that enable texts to resonate in new ways.
Dr. Julie Beth Napolin is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at The New School and author of The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020). The book returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form.
Dr. Stephen M. Best is Rachael Anderson Stageberg Professor of English and director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. His publications include The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago, 2004), and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018). Of late, he has been thinking about the phatic and the apophatic in black life, or the way the connectedness we call blackness often sticks to the expressions of the cannot-be-said--as often in memes as in the writings of James Baldwin.
Details:
Date: March 19th, 2026
Time: 6:30 - 8 pm.
Location: Student Center, Room 300
ASL interpretation will be provided.
LBC Credits will be available for this event.
Parking information for guests:
We recommend that guests to campus use the Mid Campus/Bowen field pay parking lot. Alternately, you can also find parking at McKenney Lot and Student Center Lot. A limited number of parking passes will be available at the event for complimentary parking. Please feel free to contact jnt@emich.edu by Mar. 3rd to reserve one in advance.
Past Dialogues and Topics
- 2025: "Between the Living and the Buried" with Erin Sharkey and Tia-Simone Gardner
- 2024: "Neurodiversity and Narrative" with Dr. Micheal Bérubé and Dr. M. Remi Yergeau
- 2023: "Video Games and Narrative" with Dr. Aubrey Anable and Dr. Soraya Murray
- 2022: “Resonance and Ruin: Narrative, Race and Cognition" with Dr. Sue J. Kim and Dr. aliyyah abdur-rahman
- 2021: "Detroit as a Narrative Space" with Detroit-based authors Desiree Cooper and kim d. hunter. Watch the video here, or check out the Detroit 20/20 contest submissions here
- 2020: “Neglected Histories, New Odysseys, and the Cultural Work of Fantasy” with Saladin Ahmed and Ausma Zehanat Khan
- 2019: “'Stand Whose Ground?' Indigeneity, Migrancy, and Sovereignty" with Jodi A. Byrd and Shailja Patel
- 2018: “Environmental Futures” with Ursula Heise and Rob Nixon
- 2017: “Temporalities of Crisis and Condition” with Lisa Lowe and Mimi Thi Nguyen
- 2016: Homi K. Bhabha and Claudia Rankine (video below or here)
- 2015: “After Post-Structuralism?” with Nancy Armstrong and Jonathon Elmer
- 2014: “Thinking Bodies” with Laura Otis and Jay Clayton
- 2013: “The Queer Commons” with José Esteban Muñoz and Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (video below or here)
- 2012: “Nonhumans: Ecology, Ethics, Objects” with Jeffrey J. Cohen and Timothy Morton
- 2011: “Failing to be Subjects: On Queerness and Negativity” with Lauren Berlant and Jack Judith Halberstam
- 2010: “Globalization Now: Flows and Limits” with Crystal Bartolovich and Paul Smith
