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Listening to the Past

Listening to the Past: Digital Approaches to the History of Sound and Language

March 19 – 20, 2026 | German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

 

Workshop at the German Historical Institute Washington | Conveners: Hans C. Boas (University of Texas, Austin) and Atiba Pertilla (GHI Washington)

Photo Credit: Homeward bound soldiers listening to the News, May 6, 1945 – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

The “Listening to the Past” workshop will bring scholars with interests in history, linguistics, and the digital humanities together to discuss the use of audio[visual] sources, the development of innovative methodologies for their study and dissemination, and assess the state of the field and chart opportunities for future research. Funding for the workshop is kindly supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung in conjunction with the research project “Let the Past Speak! Turning Migrant Letters of the 19th Century into Speech,” a joint collaboration of the German Historical Institute Washington and the University of Texas at Austin (Department of Germanic Studies) that will investigate leveraging written and oral sources with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to revive the sound of 19th-century speech.

 
Conference Venue, Hotel, Directions, and Transportation

Conference Venues

German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20009

Hotel

The Churchill Hotel
1941 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20009


Directions from the Dupont Circle Metro stop to the hotel and the GHI Washington


Public Transportation tickets

You can pay your DC Metrorail fare with a contactless credit or debit card using the “Tap. Ride. Go.” system at Metrorail station faregates, which works with physical cards, mobile wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, and smartwatches. To use the system, simply tap your contactless card or device on the faregate to enter and tap out to exit, and the fare will be automatically calculated and charged. Please note that “Tap. Ride Go.” currently only works for rides on the DC Metrorail. For Metro parking garages and lots, Metrobus routes, MTA, and partner regional bus providers, use mobile pay or reloadable fare cards to pay for your trips.

Directions from Dulles International Airport, Reagan National Airport, and Union Station to the hotel

FROM: WASHINGTON DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (IAD)

Metrorail – Silver Line

International Airport Dulles (IAD) is metro accessible. Follow airport signs to the metro entrance at Arrival Door 2 and 6. Purchase a SmarTrip Card from machines inside the metro station and take the silver line in the direction of Largo Town Center. Transfer at Metro Center to the red line in the direction of Shady Grove. Exit at the Dupont Circle station. Use the North Exit (Q Street).At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 5-6 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place and Leroy Place). The Churchill Hotel is located on the left-hand side of Connecticut Avenue, next to the Courtyard Washington and across the street from the Washington Hilton. It is a 10-minute walk from the metro station and a 15 minute walk to the German Historical Institute Washington

FROM: REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT (DCA)

Metrorail – Yellow Line

Reagan National Airport (DCA) is metro accessible. To reach downtown Washington, DC, follow airport signs to the metro entrance, located outside (in front of the airport) on the upper level. Metrorail SmarTrip cards may be purchased from machines at the metro station. Please keep SmarTrip card handy during the ride; you will need it to exit the station. Metrorail hours of operation are weekdays 5:00am until 11:30pm and weekends 7:00am until 3:00am.

Passengers should take the yellow line in the direction of Mt. Vernon Sq./Fort Totten to Gallery Place-Chinatown. Transfer to the red line in the direction of Shady Grove to Dupont Circle. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 5-6 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place and Leroy Place). The Churchill Hotel is located on the left-hand side of Connecticut Avenue, next to the Courtyard Washington and across the street from the Washington Hilton. It is a 10-minute walk from the metro station.

FROM: UNION STATION

Metrorail – Red Line

Take the red line in the direction of Shady Grove to Dupont Circle. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 5-6 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place and Leroy Place). The Churchill Hotel is located on the left-hand side of Connecticut Avenue, next to the Courtyard Washington and across the street from the Washington Hilton. It is a 10-minute walk from the metro station.

Participant Contact Information

 

Click here to see the password protected information

 
Schedule
Thursday, March 19, 2026

10:00 a.m.

Arrival and Check-in at the GHI Washington

10:30 – 11:00 a.m.

Welcome and Introductions

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Session I

Chair: Katharina Hering (GHI Washington)

Laura Fischlhammer (University of Salzburg) via Zoom: Variation in Request Strategies in 19th-Century German Correspondence

Faime Alpagu (University of Vienna) via Zoom: Listening Across Generations

 

12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch Break
 

1:30 – 3:30 p.m.

Session II

Chair: Andreas Greiner (GHI Washington)

Ákos Gocsál (University of Pécs / HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics): Linguistic Metadata to Research Sound Newsreels

Ali Raj (Columbia University): Sounding Muslim: Listening to Urdu and ‘Muslim Phonology’ in East Pakistan (1947–1971)

Josh Shepperd (University of Colorado Boulder / Library of Congress RPTF), Sadie Couture (McGill University): The U.S. Radio Archive and the Intendance of Audio Exegesis

 

3:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Coffee Break

 

4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

 

Session III

Chair: Joshua Sternfeld

Sam Backer (University of Maine) via Zoom: Racialized Language and Popular Song

Anouk Rehder (University of Strasbourg / University of Basel): The Sound of History: Auditory Strategies of Historical Representation in Contemporary German-Language Theater

 

7:00 p.m.

Conference Dinner

 
Friday, March 20, 2026


9:00 a.m.

Arrival and Check-in

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Session IV

Chair: Douglas Peach (The Library of Congress)

Stephan Elspaß (University of Salzburg) via Zoom: Regionally Colored Voices of Common Letter Writers in the 19th Century

Ursula Lehmkuhl (University of Trier): From Speech to Script

 

11:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Coffee Break

 

11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Session V

Chair: Jana Dunz-Keck (GHI Washington)

Hans Boas (The University of Texas at Austin) and Atiba Pertilla (GHI Washington): The German Dialect Engine

Thomas Schmidt (linguisticbits.de): Puzzling the Past: Reconstructing a Language Variety from Different Sources

Margaret Blevins (The University of Texas at Austin): Collecting Knowledge: The Texts Behind Our Knowledge Base

 

1:30 – 2:30 p.m.

Lunch Break

 

2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Session VI

Chair: Raphael Rössel (German Historical Institute Washington)

Pratiti Ketoki (University of Minnesota Twin Cities): Soldiers Singing: Bengali Voices, Listening Digitally and the First World War Archives

Mèhèza Kalibani (Historical Museums Foundation Hamburg / University of Tübingen): How to Deal with Historical Sound Recordings from Colonial Contexts?

 
 
 

4:00 – 4:30 p.m.

Coffee Break

 

4:30 – 5:00 p.m.

Roundtable and Concluding Discussion

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
Organizers
Hans Boas

 

Hans Boas is the Raymond Dickson, Alton C. Allen, and Dillon Anderson Centennial Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2001, he founded the Texas German Dialect Project to document and archive the remnants of Texas German for future generations. In 2004, he founded the German FrameNet project, which, since 2011 has focused primarily on developing a German frame-based Online Lexicon (G-FOL), an online learners’ dictionary. From 2012 to 2020 he served as the Director of the Linguistics Research Center and from 2018 – 2023 as the Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at UT.

Atiba Pertilla

 

Atiba Pertilla is a Research Fellow and Digital Editor at the German Historical Institute, where he is manager of the project “Mobile Lifeworlds in German-American Letters.” He is also a co-convener of the Digital Cultural Heritage DC Meetup. He received his Ph.D. in history from New York University; in addition to digital history, his research interests include financial history, the history of knowledge, and the history of migration.

 
Participants

 

Faime Alpagu

 

Faime Alpagu is a postdoctoral researcher and a lecturer at the University of Vienna’s Department of Sociology. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Vienna and recently completed a research stay at Columbia University. Her award-winning research—supported by institutions such as the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Max Kade Foundation in New York City—explores migration through biographical, auditory, visual, and memory-based perspectives. Her work focuses on the intersections of migration and refugee studies, audio-visual and archive studies, biographical research, memory, and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in academia. She applies an interpretative social research approach throughout her work. Faime is currently conducting a comparative study on migration from Turkey to Austria and the United States. Her book manuscript, Exposing Complexity in Migration Narratives: Archival and Empirical Self-Representations of Guest Workers in Austria, is under contract with Routledge’s Studies in Migration and Diaspora series.

 

Sam Backer

 

Sam Backer is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine, where he researches American cultural history, the history of capitalism, and the computational humanities. His book project, A Nation of Stages: The Political Economy of American Entertainment, 1870-1920, explores the origins of the American entertainment industry prior to the emergence of mechanically reproduced performances. Sam has presented his research at conferences and venues such as the AHA, the OAH, the Business History Conference, Keystone DH, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Hagley Center. He has published articles in venues such as the Business History Review and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. As a freelance journalist, he has been published in outlets like the Washington Post, The Baffler, and Jacobin magazine. He received a Peabody Award as part of the production team for the public radio program “Afropop Worldwide,” and currently cohosts the podcast “Money 4 Nothing,” which explores the intersections between music and capitalism.

 

Margo Blevins

 

Margo Blevins is a post-doctoral researcher with the Texas German Dialect Project (www.tgdp.org) at the University of Texas at Austin and has been with the TGDP since 2016. Her dissertation, “The Language-Tagging & Orthographic Normalization of Spoken Mixed-Language Data, with a Focus on Texas German,” investigated how transcriptions of spoken mixed-language could be processed and annotated to make future research easier, and to make future (semi-)automatic tagging more accurate.

 

Sadie Couture

 

Sadie Couture is a historian of digital culture drawing insights from media theory, science and technology studies, and sound studies to make sense of our contemporary media landscapes. Sadie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at McGill University. She has published on sound cultures, talk radio, and podcasting in AModern, Cultural Studies, MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, Media Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, and Social Media + Society, and she regularly produces audio media for both scholarly and popular audiences. In 2024 she was a doctoral intern for the Radio Preservation Task Force, and continues to serve on the RPTF’s Graduate Student Council. 

 

Jana Dunz-Keck

Jana Dunz-Keck is a research fellow in Digital History at the German Historical Institute Washington. Before she joined the GHI in 2020, she worked with the DFG-supported project “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914,” which boasted a team of scholars from seven countries in Europe and the Americas studying transregional news circulation. In 2023, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart. Focusing on digitized German-American newspapers, her PhD project, which received the first Peter Haber Prize for Digital History by the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD) in 2021, used computational methods to reveal the hidden roles of women in the immigrant press. Her current postdoctoral research project examines global perspectives and local experiences of managing internal climate migration and hazard mitigation (1980-2023).

 

Stephan Elspaß

 

Stephan Elspaß is Full Professor of German Linguistics at the Department of German Language and Literatures at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He has worked and published extensively on language variation and change, dialectology, (historical) sociolinguistics, the history of New High German and language politics. Currently, he is conducting projects on standardization, on the linguistic geography of colloquial German, German dialects in Austria, language perceptions and attitudes in the realm of secondary education and on variational pragmatics in German. He is the author of Sprachgeschichte von unten (Language history from below, 2005) and co-author of an online linguistic atlas of German (Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), www.atlas-alltagssprache.de, 2003–) and a new textbook on language variation and change in German (Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel, to appear in 2025)

 

Laura Fischlhammer

 

Laura Fischlhammer is a PhD candidate and research associate at the University of Salzburg, where she has contributed to the Weave project “Variational pragmatics of German – Comparing Communicative Patterns.” In her PhD project, she investigates pragmatic variation in 19th-century German correspondence. Her broader research interests include historical and variational pragmatics, (historical) sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

 

Ákos Gocsál

 

Ákos Gocsál is an Associate Professor at the University of Pécs, Faculty of Music and Visual Arts, Pécs, Hungary, and Research Fellow at the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary. A university faculty member and researcher with 25+ years of experience, he is mainly involved in teacher education, but his research activities, with a background in Phonetics, focus on different aspects of spoken communication, including research into the language use of old newsreels and various aspects of human communication. His most important conference presentations include a keynote speech on old newsreels, delivered at the Sixth International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research in Budapest, September 2024, and a presentation on student-teacher interaction in one-to-one (music) teaching situations (ANZARME, University of Auckland, New Zealand, November 2024).

 

Katharina Hering

 

Katharina Hering is a trained archivist and historian. She works as a Digital Project Librarian at the GHI in Washington, DC, where she has supported the DFG-funded relaunch of German History in Documents and Images and the development of German History Intersections. She also regularly teaches the digital literacy general education course The Digital Past: Doing Oral History in the Digital Age at George Mason University. She frequently uses rapid response collections, such as the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank or The Journal of the Plague Year, as resources and teaching tools. She holds a MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh, a PhD in history from George Mason University, and a MA in political science and history from the University of Hamburg. A CV and list of publications can be accessed through her Zotero profile: https://www.zotero.org/khering

 

Mèhèza Kalibani

 

Mèhèza Kalibani is a curator for the colonial past and postcolonial present at the Hamburg Historic Museums Foundation. He holds a PhD in History from the Institute of History Didactics and Public History at the University of Tübingen. He also holds a master’s degree in International Cultural and Historical Studies from the University of Siegen and studied German Studies at the University of Lomé. His areas of expertise include historical sound recordings, sound archives and their postcolonial significance, African History, history of German colonization, postcolonial theories, memory culture, restitution issues, and the decolonization of museum collections.

 

Pratiti Ketoki

 

Pratiti Ketoki is a doctoral student in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Their work lies in the interaction of Bengali migration, Global Asias and sound studies, and they examine how music creates community in Bengali diasporas. They are a minor in RIDGS and Early Modern Studies, with their interest lying also in disability studies and early modern music cultures. They are the lead convener of the Global Asias Collaborative. Their work focuses on Bengali sound and Bengali voices in the archive, and looks at larger themes of migration and movement from Bengali.

 

Ursula Lehmkuhl

 

Ursula Lehmkuhl is a Professor of International History at the University of Trier. Her research interests include migration history and the history of international relations, with a focus on the Atlantic and Pacific regions. She serves as the academic director of the Deutsche Auswandererbriefsammlung (German Emigrant Letter Collection), a repository of 19th- and 20th-century migrant correspondence hosted by the Research Library Gotha (www.auswandererbriefe.de). Together with Simone Lässig, formerly director of the German Historical Institute Washington D.C., she is working on the creation of a digital archive of transatlantic correspondence bringing together the two sides of migrant letters: homeland letters – letters written by German immigrants in the United States to their friends and families who stayed in Germany – and America letters – letters written by those who stayed at home to their emigrated kin living in the United States. Since 2022 she has also been involved in the field of digital history as co-spokesperson for the NFDI consortium 4Memory, which is one of 26 consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure initiated and financed by the federal Government of Germany. 4memory systematically unites the producers and users of historical data in historical research institutions (universities; non-university research institutions), memory institutions (archives, libraries, museums, and collections), and information infrastructures.

 

Douglas Peach

 

Douglas D. Peach is a Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. As an ethnomusicologist and public folklorist, Peach has over twelve years of experience in leading programs and supporting institutions working at the intersection of music, cultural heritage, and the traditional arts. At the American Folklife Center (AFC), Peach supports the AFC’s directive to present and preserve folklife by leading documentation projects, creating public events, and conducting research for public audiences. Peach is also the program manager for the COVID-19 American History Project—an initiative to document and archive Americans’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. He holds a PhD from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University.

 

Ali Raj

 

Ali Raj is a generalist of sound, with a keen interest in rhetoric, aesthetics and the intellectual history of modern South Asia. In a former life, he was a journalist and musician. Presently, he is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communications at Columbia University.

 

Anouk Rehder

 

Anouk Rehder is a doctoral candidate in German Literary Studies pursuing a binational joint PhD (double degree PhD) at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and the University of Strasbourg (France). She holds a three-year French “contrat doctoral” and is employed as a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. Jointly supervised by Prof. Dr. Nicola Gess (University of Basel) and Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Béhague (University of Strasbourg), her dissertation explores the use of sound in performative stagings of historical events, its ability to shape historical understanding and cultural memory, and its aesthetic and narrative functions within these contexts.

 

Raphael Rössel

 

Raphael Rössel is a research fellow in North American history at the German Historical Institute Washington. His current research project focuses on the history of hazing at nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. colleges. He received his PhD at Kiel University in 2022 with a dissertation on the history of family care for children with disabilities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The study analyzes the social history of the everyday lives of households raising children with disabilities. It received multiple awards and was shortlisted for the prestigious Hedwig Hintze Preis for the best dissertation which is awarded by the German Association of Historians. The thesis appeared in book form as Belastete Familien? Eine Alltagsgeschichte westdeutscher Haushalte mit behinderten Kindern (1945–1990) (Campus 2022). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern European History, Studies in Contemporary History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, and elsewhere.

 

Thomas Schmidt

 

Thomas Schmidt obtained his PhD in German linguistics from the University of Dortmund in 2004. His research interests include spoken language corpora, computer lexicography, research data management and the application of AI methods in linguistic research. He worked at the Special Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg, headed the Archive for Spoken German at the Institute for the German Language, and was responsible for building up the Research and Infrastructure Support at the University of Basel. He is currently a senior researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen and works as a freelancer at linguisticbits.de.

 

Josh Shepperd

 

Josh Shepperd is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press), which was recognized by five book awards. He is co-writing the official History of Public Broadcasting for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Current, and is the founding Associate Editor of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (University of California Press). Josh directs the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force and Sound Submissions Project.

 

Joshua Sternfeld

 

Joshua Sternfeld is a historian, program leader, and heritage strategist whose work focuses on the implications of artificial intelligence for libraries, archives, and museums. He spent more than fifteen years at the National Endowment for the Humanities (2009-2025), serving as Senior Program Officer and Assistant Director in the Division of Preservation and Access, where his work included managing programs that enabled LAMs to experiment with machine learning, computational analysis, and data-driven approaches to large-scale cultural collections, as well as helping to launch and shape the Humanities Perspectives on AI initiative to advance field-wide conversations about ethics, interpretation, access, and long-term stewardship. In parallel with his program leadership, Sternfeld is an active scholar whose writing on history and emerging technologies has appeared in leading academic journals. Joshua currently works as an independent consultant and advisor on AI strategy, research integrity, program development, and responsible innovation.