What is sound? Among the various ways of absorbing the world through the senses (looking, reading, watching, touching, tasting), what is unique to the actions of listening and hearing? And over the course of human history, how has sound been variously deployed, framed, and constructed? This course covers a diverse range of topics in the fast-developing interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies from the philosophy of sound to psychoanalytic theories of the voice, the gendered histories of telephones, accounts of radio and decolonization, film sound, sonic expressions of race, the politics of global popular music, mobile media technologies, and cutting-edge approaches to sound art.