Melissa Van Drie is a researcher and artist, specializing in cultural histories of sound and listening (19th-21st Centuries). She holds degrees in music performance, musicology, theatre studies, and literature (Emory, NYU, Sorbonne Nouvelle). Her research explores sensory practices, performance, and material culture in knowledge production across the arts and sciences. Her arts practice happens through multiple forms, including: performance lectures, culinary performances and workshops, re-enactments, installations, creative writing, sound and musical works based on archival traces and field recordings.
Her Ph.D. (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) examined how modern sound technologies, modes of attention and practices of listening were shaped and shared by theatre culture in the late 19th century. Melissa has held research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, the Sorbonne, the EHESS (Paris), and the University of Maastricht. These fellowships fostered multimodal studies on listening in the history of medicine, STS, and media archeology.
Her most recent project Sounds Delicious Project was developed at the University of Copenhagen and funded by a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship. It explores the multiple ways in which sound and vibratory sensing matter to making food and taste. One aim is to create new stories that represent the agency of nonhumans in foodways, contributing to multispecies anthropology and the environmental humanities. In connection, she designed arts research courses and workshops on sound, ecology and food for the Royal Danish Academy of Art, the ÉSAD Grénoble-Valence, and the Beaux Arts de Paris. Melissa plays clarinet, piano, and sings. She practices contemporary dance and is enchanted by honeybees.
- Van Drie, Melissa. “The Food.” In Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, London: Bloomsbury, 2020: 129-146. Online: https://www.academia.edu/44700739/The_Food
- Van Drie, M. and C. J. Maier. “Rhythming: A Manifesto” Sound Studies Interdisciplinary Journal, 2021, 7:2. https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2021.1982450.
- Van Drie, Melissa. “Learning to Give Place: Reclaiming Sensory Experience for Planetary Liveability.” Being in Place, NXT Magazine, 2022.
- Van Drie, Melissa. “Refaçonner l’oreille, prendre en main la voix: le comédien et le phonographe.” Le comédien et l’objet technique, 2019.
- Van Drie, Melissa. “‘Acts of Listening through: towards a History of Multiple Ears.’” In Lauren Tortil, Une Généalogie Des Grandes Oreilles, 2019: 12–16.
- Harris, A. and M. Van Drie “Sharing Sound: Teaching, Learning, and Researching Sonic Skills.” Sound Studies, 2015. doi:10.1080/20551940.2015.1079076.
- Van Drie, Melissa. “Hearing through the Théâtrophone: Sonically Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in the Late Nineteenth-Century French Theatre.” SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2016. doi:10.7146/SE.V5I1.23310.
- Van Drie, Melissa. “Training the Auscultative Ear: Medical Textbooks and Teaching Tapes (1950–2010)”, The Senses and Society, 8:2, 2013, p. 168-199.