Keynote Speaker: 7th Annual Conference
We are pleased to welcome Renée Bergland, Professor of English, Simmons College, as our keynote speaker for the 7th Annual Graduate Student Conference. Bergland earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1997. She has taught at the University of the District of Columbia, Marymount University, the University of New Hampshire, Boston University and Dartmouth College, before coming to Simmons in 1999. At Simmons, Bergland teaches a wide range of courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century American Literature. She is particularly interested in Native American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies. She also teaches in the Graduate Consortium in Women’s and Gender Studies, and holds a research appointment in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Professor Berlgand’s work tends to span broad expanses of time, to offer slightly startling juxtapositions, to rely on close readings of both literary and historical texts, and to explicitly advocate a dialogic ethics of analysis, while trying to connect the past to the present. Her writing always reflects my commitments to transnational, transhistorical, cross-cultural analysis. (Read her full bio here)
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this conference, we are looking forward to Professor Bergland’s contribution as someone whose work often attempts to think outside disciplinary bounds.
(also see the Call for Papers)
Call for Papers: 7th Annual Conference
"Tracing the Goth/ic: Viewing Culture through Barbarism”
The Graduate Music Society of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Boston University would like to invite submissions for its 7th Annual Graduate Student Conference. This interdisciplinary conference will showcase the lens that ‘Gothic’ affords the humanities to view both themselves and each other. From the beautiful to the ridiculous, Gothic has meant many things over the past millennium. The aesthetic lens of the Gothic in 1853 was characterized by John Ruskin as Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity, and Redundance. How, a century and a half later, do we use a ‘Gothic’ lens to view the world, past and present? We encourage papers from across discipline to explore the Gothic, with topics that could include (but not limited to) specific references to a Gothic aesthetic or topics more broadly connected to ideas of barbarity, such as otherness, deviance, exoticism, or colonialism. The format of the paper sessions will be in a seminar style, thus we ask that papers be pre-circulated two weeks in advance of the conference. Presenters will have a chance to briefly summarize their work with most of the session time devoted to discussion of the papers. The conference will take place February 8, 2014 at Boston University, with pre-conference activities the evening before. Abstracts of 250 words are due by Dec. 6 to Jeannette Jones, jonesj@bu.edu. Notifications of acceptances will be sent by Dec. 30
AMS and SEM news
Several of our members will be participating in the upcoming national meeting of the American Musicological Society and Society for Ethnomusicology.
At AMS:
Jeannette Jones will present “Lyrics in the Air: The Role of Music Videos in Deaf Culture”, at a session titled “Music and Disability on Screen” Thursday November 7th from 8-11:00 pm. She will also be serving as student representative to the AMS Council for the New England Chapter.
Robert Crowe, soprano, will give a concert, "Carissimi to Croft: The Influence of the Italian Solo Motet in English Sacred Solo Music of the Restoration," Friday, November 8th, 2-3:30pm, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, 328 Sixth Avenue. Robert will be accompanied by Peter Sykes, organo portative, and Victor Coelho, theorbo, both of Boston University.
At SEM:
Andrea Lieberherr Douglass will present “The performance of cultural tourism in the Appenzell, Switzerland” in the session called “Challenges of Cultural Heritage” on Thursday, November 14th at 10:45-12:15 .
Karl Haas will present “Music and Matter, Time and Space: Considerations of the Materiality of a West African Performance Tradition” at 3:15 pm on Thursday, November 14th.
Ulrike Prager will present "When Loss Sounds: Forced Migration and the New German Sonic Homeland" at 8:30 am on Friday, November 15th.
Amanda Daly Berman is chairing the Celtic Music SIG (Special Interest Group) and has been elected to the SEM Student Union as a Member-at-Large.
