Writing

Napolin’s first monograph, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020), returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which anglophone and francophone narrative and novel theory developed, seeking in “resonance” an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. It follows transformations in narrative acoustics through the resonances between the work of Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman. In 2021, the book was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association first book award.

A new book project, “After Images,” is a study of aural testimony, witnessing, and recitation, of the imprint of sound and voice on memory in instances where images fail to appear or are otherwise blocked from civic and political reckoning.

Having been Associate Director of The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project and a reporter for KALW’s Philosophy Talk, Napolin continues to work on a digital sound projects. In 2020, she produced an oral history of Henry Street Settlement in the time of COVID-19, a project that was acquired by the New York Public Library.

For more information and CV, go here.