In her new book Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting (A Social History of the Modern Voice), Josephine Hoegaerts explores how speaking became a central aspect of modern political and professional lives, and how our expectations of speakers were shaped in the nineteenth century. In this period of democratization, new mass media, and significant social and economic shifts, speaking well became an important skill for a growing group of people – including workers, women, and children.

Learning how to raise one’s voice, address a crowd and sound pleasant while doing so was not easy, however, and required these speakers to bend their minds, tongues and bodies to a range of stringent and often confusing norms. Doing so could be both stifling and liberating: learning to speak well often meant suppressing seemingly natural tendencies, but it could also open the door to emancipation. The sound of these modern forms of speech and its educational, political and cultural consequences still echo in our ears today.

We will discuss the emancipatory promises as well as the normative frameworks of modern voice and speech in a panel conversation including experts on oracy education, the politics of sound, and the history of the body.