Research Areas

Caribbean, Latin American, and U.S. literature of the 20th and 21st centuries; history and theory of sound technologies; linguistic anthropology; computational humanities

Tom McEnaney investigates the meaningfulness of sound at the intersection of literature, technology, and politics. His book, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas (FlashPoints at Northwestern University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the 2018 Modernist Studies Association's First Book Prize, investigates the co-evolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States. The book charts the rise and fall of populism and state socialism, and how authors in these countries began to re-conceive novel writing as an act of listening in order to shape the creation and understanding of the vox populi. He is at work on a book about textual and musical experiments with tape technology in the late 1960s and their consequences for testimonial writing, rock nacional , electronic music, and audiobooks in the Americas. His research has appeared in La Habana Elegante, The Journal of Musicology, The New York Times, The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, PMLA, Representations, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Sounding Out!, and other venues. Professor McEnaney is on the executive committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies, the Data Science Lab (D-Lab), and the Program in Critical Theory. Before returning to Berkeley, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. While at Cornell, Professor McEnaney also founded the Latin American Journals Project, an online archive and hub of digitized literary journals and newspapers from throughout Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean. The aim of this project is to increase access to and work with these extraordinary journals for people across the world.