Writing has been essential in driving contemporary art forward since the middle of the 20th century. However, where once we entered galleries to find words displayed on walls or in vitrines, now we are encountering language in the artworld in a qualitatively different way. Art's literary content is entering the gallery as sound, through the medium of the recorded voice, as artists are drawn increasingly to present texts in the form of voiceover. The concept of voiceover is familiar to us from documentary film, but video, installation and new media artists are pushing the format in new and unexpected directions. Voices in the Gallery aims to carry out the first investigation of the voiceover as a phenomenon that exists simultaneously as art-form, literary genre and sonic intervention. By bringing together ideas and perspectives from art, literature and sound studies, it will deliver an original, interdisciplinary theory of voiceover. This project will use the voiceover as a medium by which to explore how writing operates in art practices today: Why is the human voice so pervasive in contemporary art? How do audiences engage with voiced writing? How does vocalization affect our experience of language-driven artworks in the gallery? How can we critically assess the literary and aesthetic features of a voiceover track? How can galleries equip listeners to 'read aurally': to interpret vocalized text that remains unseen? In answering these questions, this project will produce a range of academic and non-academic outputs and activities. My research presentations and article will establish a new field of crossdisciplinary inquiry. My agenda-setting monograph will shape how artists, institutions and critics make, curate and analyze voiceover in future. Partnership with creative industries is integral to this project. The research will be carried out in collaboration with engagement, exhibitions and public programming professionals at Nottingham Contemporary and John Hansard Gallery. These organizations combine international reputations for curating the most innovative contemporary art with a profound commitment to engaging diverse local audiences. By embedding ongoing research in the galleries, and engendering dialogue and exchange between arts professionals and HE, the project will mobilize insights from the research to open entry points into language-driven arts practices. Close listening workshops and study sessions will invite participants to explore new ways of experiencing and interpreting voiced writing in art. Broadside leaflets freely distributed in galleries, will guide and enrich audiences' experiences of voiceover. An off-site exhibition in Southampton city centre will invite new publics to experience a specially curated voiceover installation in their civic space. Crossing between disciplines, working with cultural institutions and their communities, this innovative leadership project will transform how we encounter, mediate and explicate an important, emergent mode of contemporary art-making.