4:00 PM
Graduate Colloquium: Dr. Brigid Cohen
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Musicology, Ethnomusicology & Music Theory
"Music, Facticity, and Truth-Telling: Sounding Reality after Genocide"
Professor Brigid Cohen, New York University
In partnership with the Centre of Jewish Studies and Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
This talk explores music’s possibilities as a mode of truth-telling after forced migration and genocide. Addressing repertories and performances by persecuted Jewish composers and musicians of the 1940s and 1950s, this talk brings music into dialogue with philosophical interventions that address responsibility, reality, and facticity in the wake of genocidal state violence.
Brigid Cohen is a historical musicologist who specializes in the historiography of musics and musicians in migration. Her research examines the mass dislocation of peoples over the last two centuries, addressing conditions of empire, globalization, genocide, exile, and minority experience. Cohen has published extensively on the politics of 20th-century avant-gardes, archive theory, histories of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, and 20th-century German-Jewish diasporic thought. Her first book Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Lewis Lockwood Prize of the American Musicological Society for best monograph of the year by a scholar at an early career stage. She is currently writing Musical Migration and Imperial New York (under contract with University of Chicago Press), which explores questions of displacement and citizenship through a study of New York concert avant-gardes, jazz, electronic music, and performance art in the 1950s and 1960s.
Room 130, 80 Queen's Park
Free and open to the public. Presentation will be followed by a casual reception.