Studies in Travel Writing

Special issue: Sound and Travel Writing

Guest editors: Jennifer Linhart Wood and Ellen R. Welch

We invite contributions to a special issue considering the sonic dimension of travel writing. The issue aims to foster a sustained reflection on audition as a means of experiencing, knowing, and/or describing places and cultures. We hope to explore: How might the “sonic turn” offer fresh perspectives on a literary form that has traditionally been associated with ocularcentrism and the authority of the eyewitness? How have particular places been associated with particular sounds in different cultural and historical contexts and how has travel writing reinforced or subverted these associations? How can the conceptual resources of Sound Studies shed light on the phenomenology of travel, practices of place-making, or the epistemological force of ethnography and geography?

Possible topics of inquiry may include (but are not limited to) the notion of soundscape as it applies to travel writing; travelers’ techniques and habits of listening; sound and otherness; noise; music or language as sound; acoustics and the built environment; “natural” versus human-made sounds; sound and affect; sound as it intersects with travelers’ experiences of (dis)ability including Deafness; sound and empire; the poetics of writing sonic experience.

We welcome proposals from scholars at all stages of their careers working on any period, geographical area(s), and language traditions. Please submit 250- to 300-word proposals and a 100-word biographical note by August 15 at the following link: https://forms.gle/rDNZotaRH4rUBH9u6.  Decisions to include the proposed papers will be communicated by August 31. Completed articles will be due by January 15, 2026, with a projected publication date in early 2027.