Sylvia Sukop completed her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis in 2018, and was awarded the Senior Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2018-2019. She is former director of the Summer Writers Institute at Washington University, and served for three years on its faculty. Named an Olin Fellow in 2021, she is currently a PhD student in Germanic Languages and Literatures, with a research interest in public memory and memorialization.
Sound, like a bullet, travels, and at sufficiently high decibels can penetrate the flesh of its target. The damage inflicted by sonic weaponry such as the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is real and measurable, both physically and psychically, and its racialized genealogy can be traced back to anti-Black White mobs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular the World War I era.