Iris Blake is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of American Studies. Their research and teaching interests include sound studies, critical ethnic studies, queer and feminist disability studies, and cultural production.
Her book manuscript, Undisciplining the Voice, interrogates how coloniality has shaped knowledge about the voice and analyzes sound installation, multimedia performance, and visual art as alternative archives for voicing and listening. Her analysis emphasizes how contemporary artists activate the interplay between environment, technology, and embodiment in relation to structures of colonialism and heteropatriarchy, inviting their audiences to become co-participants in undisciplined pedagogies of voicing and listening. Iris is currently revising this project to account for their shifting embodiment and listening practice as a newly hard of hearing scholar.
Prior to joining UMBC, Iris was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where she taught courses engaging critical race and transnational feminisms, Indigenous feminist theories, queer theory, and abolition. From 2020-2022, Iris was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, where they were affiliated with the Department of Musicology and the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research (PEER) Lab, which aims to decolonize methodologies and analysis of music, sound, and the senses. While earning her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Iris’s work was supported by the Center for Ideas and Society, and she contributed to the Humanities Action Lab’s Climates of Inequality public memory project via the Humanities Careers in Science History, Policy, and Communication program.
Education
PhD, Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside
MM, Ethnomusicology, University of Texas at Austin
BA, Music and French, Arizona State University
Publications
Blake, Iris. “Sounding Suspension and the Unresolved: Pandemic Grief as Accumulation in Coco
Fusco’s Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word.” In “Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis,” ed. Dan
DiPiero and Christine Capetola. Special Issue, American Music Perspectives 2, no, 2 (2021):
123-138. https://doi.org/10.5325/ampamermusipers.2.2.0123.
Blake, Iris. “Decolonial Echoes: Voicing and Listening in Rebecca Belmore’s Sound Performance.” In
“Sound Acts: Unmuting Performance Studies,” ed. Caitlin Marshall, Patricia Herrera, and Marci R.
McMahon. Special Issue, Performance Matters 6, no. 2 (2020): 8-25.
Blake, Iris. “The Vocal Apparatus’s Colonial Contexts: France’s Mission Civilisatrice and
(Settler) Colonialism in Algeria and North America.” In Sonic Histories of Occupation, edited by
Jeremy E. Taylor and Russell Skelchy, 25-49. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022.
Blake, Iris. “Listening to Black Women’s Sonic Labor.” Review of Liner Notes for the
Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, by Daphne A. Brooks. Sound Studies
9, no. 1 (2022): 122-125. https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2022.2106625.
Courses Taught
AMST 100 Introduction to American Studies
AMST 325 Studies in Popular Culture