CALLIOPE is a research project funded by European Research Council. Focusing on the role of human voices in practices of political transfer, it looks 'beyond' Europe to understand how representation and citizenship were articulated in the British and French empires of the nineteenth century.

The project devises an innovative methodological approach to include the sound of the human voice in studies of the past preceding acoustic recording. Adapting methods developed in sound studies and combining them with the tools of political history, the project proposes a new way to analyse parliamentary reporting, while also drawing on a variety of sources that are rarely connected to the history of politics.

The main source material for the study are transcripts of parliamentary speech (official reports and renditions by journalists). However, the project also mobilizes educational, satirical and fictional sources to elucidate the convoluted processes that led to the cultivation, exertion, reception and evaluation of a voice ‘fit’ for nineteenth-century politics.