Spring 2013 Faculty Development Seminar:
Ron Radano
Music
This faculty seminar proposes an alignment of music studies, global studies, and race studies as part of a new line of inquiry in the critical study of culture. It will place front and center this set of questions: Why did US black music become the central measure of aesthetic value at the onset of the modern, global metropolis, and in what ways did its sonic contours re-cast the aural and cultural environments of the new imperial city? How, moreover, did the musical production of race give form to modern, popular affective capacities—to the very ways in which world-metropolitan listening audiences learned to consume a racial feeling in sound? By exploring a range of interactive researches—from the phenomenology of listening to the commodification of music to the sonic transformation of the international public sphere—the seminar will seek to gain a new appreciation of the audible constitution of race and its significance in the making of modern global history.
Programmed by the Center for the Humanities and Institute for Research in the Humanities (with major support from the Office of the Dean of the College of Letters & Science), the Faculty Development Seminars in the Humanities enabled an individual tenured faculty member or a team of two tenured faculty members to lead a seminar on a topic of broad interest across the humanities. The seminar leaders received a course release for directing a seminar of other faculty members who met ten times during a semester in two-hour sessions.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities and the Center for the Humanities.