Dr. Jennifer O'Meara

This book, to be published by University of Texas Press in early 2022, examines the representation, reception and remediation of female voices in contemporary screen media, including how digital technologies, formats and platforms (like YouTube, Virtual Reality, GIFs, podcasts and voice-activated assistants) are impacting women's voices in more traditional screen formats like cinema. Pioneering a transmedial approach for analysing women's screen voices in the digital era, the book examines how concepts like 'expanded cinema' and 'proliferating screens' can alter the presentation of voices as much as images--in part by allowing for verbal/vocal echoes to travel from one screen medium to another. With a dual focus on female characters and performers in English-language media, I argue that the contemporary media landscape provides new ways to amplify women's voices (including historical ones), but also new ways to fetishise, police and silence them. The book revises earlier conceptions of the female screen voice in analogue film, as presented in Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror (1988), Amy Lawrence's Echo and Narcissus (1991) and Britta H. Sjogren's Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (2006). Using the premise of the vocal echo, and extending Silverman's focus on 'the acoustic mirror' as it relates to voice-over and sound-image relations, I propose a new symbolic functioning for the female screen voice in the 21st century; wherein this mirror has shattered, dispersing vocal shards across a much broader range of screens.

This project will analyse formal and thematic connections between digital screen cultures and experimental film and art practices of the 20th century. The research aims to historicise trends in Augmented Reality (AR), glitch art, and experimental digital video streams in relation to the artistic traditions of Surrealism, Futurism and Cubism. This will be achieved through a theoretical focus on overlapping aesthetics and processes, as well as the practitioners' creative deployment of the technologies of their time. In particular, the project seeks to examine how both experimental cultures offer new ways of experiencing the human body, with an emphasis on mediated presentations of the abstracted self. Envisioned as a monograph with complementary gallery installation components, the first publication from the project is as follows: O'Meara, 'Touchscreens, tactility, and material traces: From avant-garde artists to Instagram ASMRtists,' NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (Autumn 2019).

This project aims to establish a cross-disciplinary approach to studying the therapeutic uses of digital media by developing a network of psychology, neuroscience and media studies researchers who can, together, examine how digital media formats and practice can help alleviate particular mental health issues. By examining a range of relaxation focused videos, podcasts and apps in terms of their psychological impact (on mood and emotion) and their physiological impact on the brain and other parts of the body, the project aims to offer a pioneering understanding of digital forms of relaxation and therapy, and to make recommendations about how such media might be used as part of a personalised treatment plan for those who experience conditions like anxiety and depression.