March

Deborah Davidson's show at Gallery 360

March 6-April 12

Artists and Practitioners in Residence Program: Stephen Lang

March 7-9

The Humanities Center's APRP Program will host actor and playwright Stephen Lang on campus for three days. His most recent role was Col. Miles Quaritch in James Cameron's Avatar (2009).

Artists and Practitioners in Residence Program: Deborah Davidson

March 15-17

The Humanities Center's APRP Program will host artist and curator Deborah Davidson on campus for three days.

American Identity in the Age of Obama

Friday March 25 at The Amilcar Cabral Center in the John D. O'Bryant African American Institute, All Day Conference

The Humanities Center and the John D. O'Bryant African American Institute will co-host an all-day conference on American Identity in light of Obama's election. Academics from an array of disciplines and universities throughout the Northeast will discuss how much, or how little, has changed since that pivotal moment in history.

Meet the Author: Alice Echols

Wednesday March 30, 12-1:30PM, 90 Snell Library

Echols will discuss her new book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.

About Alice Echols

Alice Echols is Professor of English, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at USC. She is the author of four books that have shifted our understanding of the "long Sixties." Her first, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75, was a pioneering social and intellectual history of second-wave feminism, one that emphasized its vital but vexed relationship to Black Power and the New Left. In 1990, Daring was named a Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Winner. Her second book, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, is a biography of the rock singer and a cultural history of the counterculture and the music scene of which Joplin was a part. It was named one of the "Best Books of 1999" by the Los Angeles Times. Echols's articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as Social Text, Criticism, and Socialist Review, and in popular publications such as The Nation, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Women's Review of Books, and BookForum. Many of them appear in her collected essays, Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks. Her most recent book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, probes disco's "hotness," which Echols locates in disco's upending of America's racial rules and gender and sexual conventions. Music is often understood as reflecting social change, but "Hot Stuff" demonstrates that music can itself enact change. Echols has been featured on ABC's 20/20, The History Channel's 1969, and the BBC's (and Biography Channel's) documentary Southern Discomfort: Janis Joplin. She has been interviewed at length by the New York Times, The Nation, and Salon, and has appeared on many radio programs, including Britain's premiere morning talk show, Today Programme, and many NPR programs, including On Point, Morning Edition, and Studio 360. She is currently at work on a book about a Depression-era banking scandal in Colorado.

Popular Music and Social Movements: A Panel Discussion

Wednesday March 30, 4:30-6:30PM, 90 Snell Library

This panel will feature Alice Echols, English, Gender Studies and History, University of Southern California; Emmett Price, Chair, African American Studies, Northeastern University; Murray Forman, Communication Studies, Northeastern University; and Holly Tessler, Music, Northeastern University. This event will be followed by a reception.

About The Panelists

ALICE ECHOLS is Professor of English, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at USC. See her extended bio above for more.

EMMETT G. PRICE III has quickly risen as one of the nation's leading experts on African American Music and Culture as well as cutting edge research on bridging the generational divide. A well regarded musician, educator, speaker and consultant, Dr. Price actively researches, lectures and writes about African American Music with a focus on social, political, economic, cultural and religious analysis. He is a noted print and broadcast media expert on African American Music and Culture, The Black Church, Hip Hop Culture and Youth Culture. Dr. Price is also a widely sought after motivational speaker to youth and young professionals as well as to corporations and non profits engaging youth and young professionals. He is an associate professor of music and African American studies at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) where he also serves as chair of the Department of African American Studies. A former research fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Dr. Price currently is a research fellow of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, where he serves as the lead scholar on the Rhythm & Flow Initiative - a research project studying the various intersections of music and sport. Past honors include and the "African Americans Making History Today: Living Legend Award" from the Boston Renaissance Charter Public School.

MURRAY FORMAN'S main research interests are in the social uses of popular music and the critical analysis of media industries, cultural production, and communication. His work also engages with issues of media and representation in contemporary society from a Cultural Studies perspective, with particular emphasis on images and discourses pertaining to hip-hop, race and identity and issues of youth, elders, and age in society. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and Co-editor, with Mark Anthony Neal, of That's the Joint!': The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004; Second Edition, 2010), as well as authoring numerous articles on youth, race, popular music, television, and film. He is currently completing a book titled One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2011) for which he received a 2003-2004 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Dr. Forman serves on the Advisory Board of the Archives of African American Music and Culture (Indiana University) as well as serving on editorial advisory boards of several scholarly journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication; The Journal of Popular Music Studies; Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

HOLLY TESSLER completed a BA in English Literature and a BA with Distinction in Urban Studies and Community Planning from Rutgers University. She completed an MBA (Music Industries) and a PhD in Music from the Institute of Popular Music/School of Music at the University of Liverpool (UK). Prior to joining Northeastern, she held various teaching posts at the University of Liverpool, Birmingham City University (UK), and the University of East London (UK). Her teaching and research expertise is in music industry theory. Specialist areas include: music and branding; the mediation of popular music; music, culture and technology; and the role of narrative in popular music/music industry practices. Dr. Tessler has conducted extensive research on the Beatles, culminating with her doctoral thesis which examined the role of storytelling and narrative in the commercialization and cultural branding of the Beatles since 1970.

Terrorism, War & Morality

Thursday March 31, 2:50-4:30 PM, 320 Shillman

This symposium brings together an interdisciplinary panel of scholars to discuss how we understand terrorism a decade after the 9/11 attacks. What do we know about terrorism's causes? Does it spring from especially evil people? Or from the same factors that cause war and other forms of violence? Do our efforts to counter terrorism make sense? Or do they rest on false assumptions?

Panelists include:

Stephen Nathanson, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University

Mickaella Perina, Department of Philosophy, Director of the Philosophy and Law Program, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Gordana Rabrenovic, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University