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Prof. Kimberly Mack - "Living Colour, Race, and Rock and Roll" Wed Nov 8, 4PM

Event Start: 
Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology)

The Center for Ethnomusicology is delighted to announce a colloquium talk featuring Prof. Kimberly Mack (English, University of Illinois) entitled:

“We pushed the boundaries by rocking through the boundaries”: Living Colour, Race, and Rock and Roll

Date: Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023
Time: 4PM-6PM 
Location: 701C Dodge Hall, Columbia U Morningside Campus @ 116th St.
Free and open to the public.

Please email aaf19@columbia.edu for more information or to arrange required accommodations. 


Prof. Kimberly Mack, Univ. of Illinois


Abstract: The iconic Black rock band Living Colour’s Time’s Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid.


Given the segregated nature of the record industry during the 1980s, with artists tethered to strict, race-based musical categories, and the resistance Black rockers sometimes faced from both White rock audiences and skeptics in the Black community, Living Colour’s success was entirely unexpected. After succeeding beyond what anyone predicted and evolving away from the need to conform to the sonic expectations of critics and fans, or chasing commercial success, their next release in 1990 reflected significant creative growth. Time’s Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as distinct as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger.


In this presentation focused on her recent 33 1/3 series book, Time’s Up, Kimberly Mack uses autobiographical narrative to explore her experience growing up in Brooklyn, New York in a family both musical and violent, and the ways in which that upbringing impacted her coming of age and musical listening. She will also have a larger conversation about race, musical genre, and cultural gatekeeping, while exploring the importance of Time’s Up, sonically, lyrically, and politically.

Speaker Bio:  
Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series, was published in May 2023. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award. Kimberly is writing another book, tentatively titled The Untold History of American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the BIPoC and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. For this project, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a senior scholar research grant from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Charles Hamm Fellowship from the Society for American Music. Kimberly is a memoirist and music writer, and her scholarly and public-facing articles have appeared in African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music StudiesAMP: American Music PerspectivesLongreads, No Depression, and elsewhere.

Columbia Ethnomusicology Welcomes Prof. Ruth S. Opara!

Ruth S. Opara The Ethnomusicology community at Columbia is delighted to welcome our new colleague, Prof Ruth S. Opara,  to the faculty! Prof. Opara holds the PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2017), and has previously taught at Skidmore College, Syracuse University, and at Columbia as a postdoctoral fellow.  

Prof. Opara’s research centers on African and African diasporic music and knowledge production. Specifically, music and decolonial discourse, women in music, music and gender, and African music and transnational encounters. As a practitioner, a teacher, and a scholar, who has lived and taught on the African continent and the diaspora, Ruth successfully straddles both world’s musical cultures. With the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and other awards, Ruth continues to research and work on her current book project, Music, Motherhood, and Transnationalism: A West African Perspective. The book focuses on a group of married women musicians to explore how they utilize music to navigate motherhood on the African continent and in the diaspora. Ruth has published peer-reviewed journal articles and has presented at many academic conferences around the world.

Welcome Prof. Opara! 

Prof. Rumya S. Putcha (U Georgia) -- "The Dancer's Voice" (Wed Sept 27 at 4PM)

Event Start: 
Wednesday, September 27, 2023 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology)
The Center for Ethnomusicology warmly invites you to attend a talk by:
Prof. Rumya S. Putcha (University of Georgia)

Title:  The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India

Date:
Wednesday September 27, 2023
Time: 4-6PM 
Location: 701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology), Morningside Campus of Columbia University, Broadway at 116th St. 
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, RECEPTION TO FOLLOW

For information or to arrange disability accommodations, please contact aaf19@columbia.edu

ABSTRACT:  In The Dancer’s Voice Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.

BIO: Rumya S. Putcha is an associate professor in the Institute for Women's Studies as well as in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia. Her research interests center on colonial and anti-colonial thought, particularly around constructs of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law. Her first book, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press, 2023), develops a transnational feminist approach to Indian performance cultures. Her second book project, Namaste Nation: Orientalism and Yoga in the 21st Century extends her work on transnational performance cultures to critical analyses of capitalist fitness industries.

Mario Cancel-Bigay Appointed as Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU's School of Liberal Studies


Dr. Mario Cancel-Bigay
We are delighted to congratulate our 2021 PhD alumnus, Dr. 
Mario Cancel-Bigay who will be taking up a tenure track position as a Clinical Assistant Professor in Global Musicology at NYU’s Liberal Studies School. 

Since finishing the PhD, Dr. Cancel-Bigay has spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, first as a recipient of the Early Career Fellowship in the Music Department and then as a Core Lecturer of Contemporary Civilization, 

Dr. Cancel-Bigay's PhD dissertation in ethnomusicology at Columbia is entitled "Sounds that Fall Through the Cracks, and Other Silences and Acts of Love: Decoloniality and Anti-Colonialism in Puerto Rican Nueva Canción and Chanson Québécoise." It was advised by Prof. Kevin Fellezs. It may be accessed via Columbia's Academic Commons (for free!) at this link.

Congratulations Mario!

Georgina Born: The Dynamics of Pluralism in Contemporary Digital Art Music -- Monday April 24, 4PM

Event Start: 
Monday, April 24, 2023 - 4:00pm
Location: 
620 Dodge Hall, Columbia U Morningside Campus, 116th and Broadway, NYC
The Center for Ethnomusicology and the Fritz Reiner Center are pleased to announce a seminar with Prof.  Georgina Born (University College, London) on Monday, April 24, at 4PM in 620 Dodge Hall, on the Columbia Morningside Campus (Broadway at 116th St.). 

[please note the room number has changed since this was initially announced!] 

This event is open to the public but space is limited.  Please RSVP to aaf19@columbia.edu if you plan to attend. 

Attendees are asked to read a book chapter by Prof. Born in advance,  entitled  "The  Dynamics  of Pluralism in Contemporary Digital Art Music," which is Chapter 8 from Prof. Born's new edited volumeMusic and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (2023, University College of London Press). The entire book is online and open source at this linkhttps://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/187643
 
Abstract: "The Dynamics of Pluralism in Contemporary Digital Art Music"
How to capture the transformation, from without and within, of a dominant art music genre? Academic electroacoustic music, and specifically acousmatic music, the modernist lineage that came to prominence from the 1970s in universities in the UK, Canada and Europe, has been both hegemonic and waning for around twenty years. In this presentation, based on a chapter from the open zxaccess book Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (2022), I explore this state of affairs through an ethnography of British university trainings in digital art music and related x, trainings I gather under the term 'music technology degrees'. The aim is to probe the burgeoning pluralism of digital art music in the UK as this presses on contemporary music writ large. My fieldwork focused on three leading British centres: the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University, Belfast, the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (MTIRC) at De Montfort University, Leicester, and the Music and Music Technology groups at the University of Huddersfield. It also involved contacts with music departments at the universities of York, Edinburgh, East London and East Anglia, and the sound art research centre at London’s University of the Arts. I observed teaching and events, attended gigs and conferences, and made relationships with teaching staff, masters and PhD students. By analysing the music technology degrees the chapter narrates a heterogeneous field in motion, buffeted by larger historical processes. A core premise is that educational change of this kind is both a barometer and a catalyst of wider musical, cultural, social and political changes. The net effect is the blossoming of an extraordinary but patterned diversity of idioms in digital art music, analysed in the final part of the chapter. This leads to a final discussion of how we should conceptualise pluralism in music today.
 
 
Prof. Georgina Born Bio:
Georgina Born is Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London. Previously she held Professorships at the Universities of Oxford (2010-21) and Cambridge (2006-10). Earlier she had a professional life as a musician in experimental rock, jazz and free improvisation. Her work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on interdisciplinarity, music, sound, and digital/media. Her books include Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995), Western Music and Its Others (ed. with D. Hesmondhalgh, 2000), Uncertain Vision (2004), Music, Sound and Space (ed., 2013), Interdisciplinarity (ed. with A. Barry, 2013),Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (ed. with E. Lewis and W. Straw, 2017), and Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (ed., 2022). She directed the ERC-funded research program ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation’ (2010-15) and in 2021 was awarded an ERC grant for ‘Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and Aarhus, Oslo, McGill and Princeton Universities.

Book Proposal Workshop for Grad Students with Robin James (Palgrave/MacMillan)

Event Start: 
Friday, February 17, 2023 - 3:00pm
Location: 
622 Dodge Hall
BOOK PROPOSAL WORKSHOP: ROBIN JAMES (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN)
Friday, February 17, 2023 - 3:00pm
622 Dodge Hall 
(Open to all graduate students and faculty in Music)

Robin James is an author and former academic, currently working as Editor of Philosophy, Literary Theory, and Music & Sound Studies at Palgrave Macmillan. She will conduct a workshop for junior scholars (graduate students, post-docs, Core Lecturers, and others) interested in turning their ideas into a successful book proposal. She will also discuss the details of the publication process, and how to pitch a project to an editor.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Ethnomusicology and is open to all members of the Music Department.

BIO:
Robin James is Editor for Philosophy, Literary Theory, and Music & Sound Studies. She acquires monographs, edited collections, handbooks, Palgrave Pivots, open access titles, textbooks, and videos in a range of subfields across those disciplines. Her list focuses on social and political philosophy, continental philosophy (both contemporary continental and the history of continental philosophy), critical theory, pop culture, African-American and Africana philosophy, American philosophy (including but not limited to pragmatism), Latinx and Latin American philosophy, literary theory, and on music studies (musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, popular music studies), sound studies, and interpersonal communication. As a former academic, author of four scholarly books, and co-editor of The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Robin is uniquely equipped to serve her authors because she’s been in their shoes.

Colloquium: Alex E. Chavez (U Notre Dame):"“El Disco es Cultura: Sonic Artifacts, Racial Geographies, and Latinx Chicago”

Event Start: 
Thursday, November 17, 2022 - 5:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall, Columbia U Morningside Campus, 116th and Broadway, NYC
The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is delighted to announce a colloquium talk by Alex E. Chavez, the Nancy O’Neill Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of Sounds of Crossing:  Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke UP, 2017).

Prof. Chavez's talk will be held on Thursday, November 17, 2022, at 5PM EST, in room 701C Dodge Hall on the Columbia University Morningside Campus. Prof. Chavez's talk is entitled: 

“El Disco es Cultura: Sonic Artifacts, Racial Geographies, and Latinx Chicago”

When: Thursday November 17, 2022, at 5PM EST.
Where: 701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology), Columbia U. Morningside Campus, Broadway at 116th St. (Map Link)

For assistance, information, or special accommodations, contact aaf19@columbia.edu

Please be vaccinated and prepared to wear a mask. 

Speaker Biography:

Artist-scholar-producer, Alex E. Chávez is the Nancy O'Neill Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, expressive culture, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018). And in 2016 he produced the Smithsonian Folkways album Serrano de Corázon (Highlander at Heart).

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of both academic research and publicly-engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores, served as creative consultant for feature films and stage performances, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.
 
In 2020, he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He currently serves as a Governor on the Chicago Chapter Board of the Recording Academy. 

His most recent publication is the article “Gender, Ethno-nationalism, and the Anti-Mexicanist Trope” —published in the 2021 winter issue of the Journal of American Folklore. And he also curated the liner notes for the 8th studio album “Puentes Sonorous” by the Grammy Award-winning group Quetzal (2021). He is co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades (SAR Press), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research in 2019.

Colloquium: Nili Belkind "Cultural Intimacy across the Palestinian/Arab-Jewish/Israeli Binary" Thursday Nov 3 at 4PM

Event Start: 
Thursday, November 3, 2022 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall, Columbia Univ Morningside Campus, Broadway @116th
The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is pleased to announce a public colloquium talk featuring Dr. Nili Belkind (Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Tel Aviv University), a PhD alumna of our program and the the author of Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production (Routledge 2021). 
Dr. Belkind will speak on: 

Cultural Intimacy across the Palestinian/Arab-Jewish/Israeli binary: Jowan Safadi’s Music Video “To Be an Arab” 

Thursday Nov 3, 2022 4PM
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology) 
Columbia Univ Morningside Campus 
Broadway at 116th St 
Reception to follow 
 FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
(Please be vaccinated and prepared to wear a mask.)
Contact aaf19@columbia.edu for more information or specific accommodations 

Abstract: The century-plus old conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian national movement has greatly contributed to the propping of collective imaginations in which “Arab” and “Jew” have been framed as polar-opposites. This polarity has sustained national narratives and ideologies, attendant historiographies, and international interventions seeking to bring an end to the conflict in Palestine-Israel—all of which are based on the axiom of separation between Palestinian/Arab and Israeli/Jew. 

Popular culture—especially music—offers us numerous examples from which to critique this myth of insularity, to analyze the violence and racism embedded in the sociopolitical structures that serve to uphold it, and to construct new frameworks for interventions in a protracted ethnonational conflict. Through a focus on Jowan Safadi’s “To Be an Arab” as a prominent case study, Dr. Belkind will unpack how cultural intimacy and ethnonational violence are intertwined in Palestine-Israel; delineate how local heterogeneities (classed, ethnicized, gendered) and complex regional affiliations complicate what is commonly read in terms of an Arab/Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli binary, and underscore the creative, emotive, interventive and subversive potentials that expressive culture and performance bring to this context. 

Speaker Bio: Nili Belkind holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. She is currently a research associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Musicology Department and an adjunct instructor at Tel Aviv University. Nili is the author of Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production (Routledge 2021), which won the International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) 2022 Best Book Prize. Her current research projects include a focus on African migrant-musicians in the US in the 1960s-1970s (with Dr. Ofer Gazit) and an ethnohistorical project (with Prof. Edwin Seroussi) focused on the archive of Azuri Effendi/Ezra Aharon—an Iraqi-Jewish musician who headed the Iraqi delegation to the First Congress of Arab Music (1932) held in Cairo and had moved to Palestine in 1934. This archive offers numerous lines of inquiry Nili has published extensively on a variety of topics, including music and international diplomacy, social movements, diasporic imaginaries, urban regeneration, and more in Ethnomusicology Journal, Current Musicology, Middle Eastern Journal of Culture and Communication, Arts and International Affairs and elsewhere.

Media Artist Sacramento Knoxx (Anishinaabe/Xicano) Tues Oct 25 at 5PM

Event Start: 
Tuesday, October 25, 2022 - 5:00pm
Location: 
701C DODGE HALL (Center for Ethnomusicology), Columbia U Morningside Campus @116th St

The Center for Ethnomusicology is delighted to announce a “meet the artist” event and jam session with leading Indigenous media artist/producer/rapper Sacramento Knoxx, to be held in 701C Dodge Hall on the Columbia Morningside Campus (The Center for Ethnomusicology) on TUESDAY OCT 25 from 5-7PM.  This event is open to all, but space is limited so come early.  Please be fully vaccinated and be prepared to wear a mask.

Sacramento Knoxx (Christopher Yepez) is an Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and Xicano media artist, emcee, music producer, and community cultural worker. A prominent interdisciplinary artist from Southwest Detroit, Knoxx brings audiences a blend of visual art and performance that inspires, educates, motivates, and engages youth and elders alike in communities of color. His work is a creative expression of identity, love, and healing that challenges and confronts social ills. He is a founding member of the Aadizookaan, a dynamic collective of creatives who, guided by ancestral indigenous-based knowledge systems, tell uplifting cultural stories through multidisciplinary art and music.

This is his fifth visit to Columbia as a guest artist, and every other visit has left a deep impression on many here. Don’t miss this if you can make it!  Knoxx will bring along some synthesizer gear and perform, but has also expressed a desire to jam with our guests, so be prepared!

Learn more about Knoxx at his website: 
https://sacramentoknoxx.wixsite.com/skmusic

Soundcloud: 
https://soundcloud.com/sacramentoknoxx

Spotify: 
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6RrwgniC9RteSetPNNuj3c

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/SouthwestKnoxx

Prof Tyler Bickford - "Adult Taste and the Business Models of Independent U.S. Children’s Musicians in the 2000s” Wed Sept 28 a

Event Start: 
Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C DODGE HALL (Center for Ethnomusicology), Columbia U Morningside Campus @116th St
The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University announces a colloquium talk by our own PhD alumnus, Prof. Tyler Bickford (English, Univ. of Pittsburgh) on Wednesday, September 28, 2022, at 4PM.

The talk will be held in 701C Dodge Hall (Columbia U Morningside Campus, 116th and Broadway). 

Free and open to the public, *all* are welcome.  Vaccinated/boosted only, masks expected to be worn. Reception to follow. 


Title: 
"Adult Taste and the Business Models of Independent U.S. Children’s Musicians in the 2000s”


Speaker bio:
Tyler Bickford is professor of children’s literature and childhood studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Trained as an ethnomusicologist, his research focuses on children’s media, especially popular music and digital technology, using ethnographic and cultural studies methods. He is the author of Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020) and Schooling New Media: Music, Language, and Technology in Children’s Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in Popular MusicWSQ: Women’s Studies QuarterlyEthnomusicologyJournal of Folklore ResearchJournal of Consumer CultureCurrent MusicologyJournal of the Society for American Music, and several edited volumes. He is the recipient of an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for Tween Pop, which was also a 2022 Children’s Literature Association Recommended Book. Schooling New Media received honorable mention for the Iona and Peter Opie Prize from the American Folklore Society.





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