New publication: "Collecting Methodologies with the Phonograph"

I contributed a chapter about collecting and researching wind-up phonographs and 78 records to the book Collecting Cinema, Rewriting Film History, full of engaging texts by scholars, collectors, archivists, and filmmakers.

“Collecting Methodologies with the Phonograph: The Performance of ‘Canned’ Vaudeville,” in Collecting Cinema, Rewriting Film History: Between the Visible and the Invisible, ed. André Habib, Louis Pelletier, Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, in collaboration with Charlotte Brady-Savignac (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025), 271-284.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on my own experience as a user and collector of 78 rpm records and wind-up phonographs, this chapter begins by developing a theoretical framework for engaging with the historical materialities of recorded sound. I highlight the interests of collapsing the scholar and collector into a single figure: a contemporary user of historical machines capable of reenacting, and reinventing, scenarios of reception and use. I then demonstrate one such scenario by building a program of “canned” vaudeville out of records from my collection. This provides an opportunity for investigating the links between vaudeville performances across media, including the short films of the early sound era.