Colloquium series

NOTE NEW DATE: 15 MARCH 2023 Dr Amanda Hsieh (Durham University) Japan, Orientalism, and Felix Weingartner’s Die Dorfschule .

Listening at the Ends of Cinemagoing: The Cinema as A Quiet Place (2018-2021) When the film A Quiet Place Part II was released, in May 2021, cinemas around the world had been empty for a long time. After months of closures due to COVID-19, with many Hollywood studios deciding to distribute their movies directly on digital...

Sounding a Queer Rebellion: LGBTI Musical Resistances in Lima, Peru This talk will introduce my most recent interdisciplinary project on Latin American LGBTI artivism and will share insights from my latest article on music, dissidence and protest. I aim to discuss how Peruvian studies on music and gender fit into the...

Performing Recorded Music: The Jamaican Reggae Sound System as Instrument This talk investigates some of the creative possibilities afforded by phonographic reproduction. It takes the instrument of the sound system set of equipment and the open-air dancehall sessions these provide to explore a number of the engineers’ “...

“Such Wine, such Women, such Musick”: Stuart Diplomats and the Siren Song of Italian Courtesans. In 1611 the English travel writer Thomas Coryat famously warned his countrymen to beware the bewitching musical virtuosity of any courtesan whom they might meet in Venice: “[S]hee will endevour to enchaunt thee partly with her...

Sounding Dissent in the Algerian Hirak In February 2019 widespread anti-government protests took place in cities throughout Algeria. As these protests became a weekly occurrence, they coalesced into Hirak , a grassroots political movement calling for greater democracy and social equality, with millions of Algerians joining...

Global Opera? In this paper, I explore what is gained by casting the spread of Italian opera beyond Europe during the early decades of the nineteenth century as a global phenomenon. With a focus on the first troupe to perform a circumnavigation of the globe, I argue that their travels can best be understood as both a...

The New “Yellow Peril” in Western European Symphony Orchestras How pervasive is anti-East-Asian racism in professional symphony orchestras in Western Europe? In this talk, Dr. Maiko Kawabata will present findings from her recent ethnographic study based on interviews with ethnically Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese...

Ultrasonic Tastemakers: Towards a Critical Gastromusicology Across African American music genres, artists have linked their musical and gustatory prowess to transport their fanbase on a multi-sensory journey, particularly in the resonance found through the overlapping development of "soul food" and "soul music" cultures...

Sonic Artifacts, African Music, and the Atlantic World