Dr. Douglas Tewksbury is Keynote Speaker at UT Austin’s Digital Field Methods Institute

Dr. Douglas Tewksbury, associate professor of communication and media studies at Niagara University, was invited to present a keynote address and lead a sound creation workshop at the Digital Field Methods Institute at the University of Texas - Austin, July 1-12, 2024. Hosted by UT Austin's Digital Writing and Research Lab, the two-week summer institute is an annual event that offers emerging and established researchers the opportunity to gain practice collecting, analyzing, and organizing data for publication while providing tools and technologies that participants can explore and experiment toward innovating new methods for scholarly research.

In his keynote talk, titled "Deep Listening/Collective Waves," Dr. Tewksbury discussed the environmental humanities and how art and sound can speak to the climate crisis and environmental issues. He highlighted the importance of art being a messenger for environmental issues, as well as the critical need for academics and artists to address the pressing issues of any time, but especially in an era of environmental crisis.

"Traditional scholarship and peer-reviewed journal articles remain vitally important, but it's equally important that we explore new ways of thinking-like art and creativity-about what we are doing in our research and our classrooms," he said. "The environmental humanities is an important approach for artists and academics to use in our duty to address the climate crisis."

Dr. Tewksbury also led institute participants in a workshop where they created a collaborative sound performance which they wrote about and used as raw material for their own creative projects and academic scholarly projects later in the week.

"As an artist and as an academic, there's nothing more exciting than when you get a group of people together to push their own boundaries on what both scholarship and art can do," he said. "It was such a pleasure getting to lead workshops and create art alongside the next generation of academics who are doing such exciting work in these areas, and I was hugely inspired by getting to collaborate with them."

A sound artist and researcher, Dr. Tewksbury's creative practice as a music and sound artist explores environmental themes through creative works, commonly using obsolete, antiquated, and often-broken media and electronic music and recording technologies. His 2024 collection "Floes: Volumes I-IV" was a collection of environmentally themed, long-form experimental works. His 2022 work "Brutes" manipulated and spliced human voices and choral performances on very long analog tape loops to create long-form compositions, while his 2021 album, "Paths," explored environmental themes through a suite of electronic, ambient, and piano works, and various field recordings. He is an alumnus of The Arctic Circle Residency's 2023 class.

He holds a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University, a master's degree from Suffolk University, and a bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University.