On this episode I'm talking with Dr. Nick Stevens about the intersections of opera and society in various historical moments—up to and including the present day. Nick is a musicologist (ecommerce production associate) for ArkivMusic, who has also taught most recently as the Visiting Assistant Professor in Musicology at the Wichita State University School of Music. His monograph, Crisis Mode: Opera as Form and Medium After the End of History, is under contract and due out within the next couple of years. On this show we discuss the "undoing of women" in traditional opera genres, the status of contemporary opera and its imbrication with neoliberal crisis, as well as musicological debates, working outside of academia, and more.

References:

Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis

Catherine Clement, Opera: The Undoing of Women

Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire 

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Susan McClary, Feminine Endings

Elizabeth S. Anker, Rita Felski, Critique and Postcritique

Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera

Clara Hunter Latham, "How Many Voices Can She Have? Destabilizing Desire and Identification Opera Quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 3-4, summer-autumn 2017.

Michael Dango, Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair

On this episode my guest is Dr. Yuridia Ramírez, a Ford Foundation Fellow and Assistant Professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ramírez earned her PhD in history from Duke University with a certificate in Latin American Studies. She also holds a BA in history and journalism from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and an MA in history from Duke University. Our conversation today covers topics related to Dr. Ramírez' current book project, tentatively titled Indigeneity on the Move: Transborder Politics from Michoacán to North Carolina, a historic and interdisciplinary analysis of a diasporic indigenous community and their transforming sense of indigeneity. 

References:

“'Two Churches in One Building': Holy Cross Catholic Church, Latino Immigration, and New Geographies of Resistance, 1988–1997", in Faith and Power Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 (New York University Press, 2022)

China Medel and Yuridia Ramírez, "“When Is a Migrant a Refugee?” Hierarchizing Migrant Life", in Migration, Identity, and Belonging (Routledge, 2020)

Pre-exposure prophylaxis or PreP treatments are  lifesaving drugs that can reduce the risk of HIV infection from sex by about 99%. Yet, in an era where a once-daily pill can prevent one of the most damaging diseases we know, decades old inequalities in our healthcare and social systems render these treatments less accessible for minoritized subjects, the very same demographic groups who are statistically at higher risk. On episode 6 I talk with my friend and colleague Dr. Nic Flores about his book project, tentatively titled, Becoming HIV-Negative: Queer of Color Community Organizing and Responses to HIV Prevention. We talk about his ethnographic fieldwork, connections to the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing a book, and more.

Nic Flores is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in public and sexual health, HIV/AIDS prevention, ethnography, comparative ethnic and racial studies, and gender and sexuality studies with additional interests in queer of color critique, disability studies, and feminist science and technology studies.

References in this episode:

My guest for this episode is Dr. Maria Harvey, Visiting Assistant Professor and Research Coordinator for the Madison Art Collection in the Department of History of Art at James Madison University. We discuss minoritized perspectives in the field of art history, what it means to "decolonize" our curricula, as well as academic labor strikes in the era of the corporate university. 

Dr. Harvey recently published an article that articulates her perspective on these issues using her expertise in southern Italian art.

On this episode my guest is Dr. Raechel Anne Jolie, author of the critically-acclaimed memoir Rust Belt Femme, which was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, an NPR Favorite Book of 2020, and a runner-up for the Heartland Bookseller’s Award. Our conversation centers around this book, but also branches into feminist and queer theory, political activism, the complicated ways that identity categories intersect, the role that music plays in politics and identity construction, contemporary witchcraft practices, and MORE (really!).

Jolie’s work explores radical social movements, theories of and toward liberation, queerness, class, pop culture, healing justice, and more. Their essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in The Baffler, Bitch Magazine, In These Times, Ravishly, Mask Magazine, Teen Vogue, Scarleteen, among others. She has been published in a variety of academic journals, and has presented at numerous national conferences. During an awarded residency stay at The Future Minneapolis, she co-wrote, edited, and published The Prison Arcana Tarot Zine. The zine was created in collaboration with the incarcerated writer c.l. Young and incarcerated artist Jamie Diaz.

Jolie has been a featured keynote speaker at conferences and symposia at The University of Kentucky, Bloomsburg University, Western Oregon University, and Whitman College. She has been a faculty member at Merrimack College, Tufts University, and Normandale College, and taught writing at The Loft Literary Center. They hold a PhD from the University of Minnesota and an MA and BA from DePaul University. They live in Cleveland Heights, Ohio on Erie and Mississauga land.

References(!):

On this episode Dr. Rebecca Gibson discusses corsets, skeletons, robots, Blade Runner, and more, while at the same time linking these apparently unrelated topics together through her methodology. Among other questions, Dr. Gibson's work asks what we can learn about gender and agency by bringing bioarcheological research on the effects of corseting into conversation with women's own words about the practice.

Rebecca Gibson is an independent scholar, whose published works include “Desire in the Age of Robots and AI: An Investigation in Science Fiction and Fact” (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), “The Corseted Skeleton: A Bioarchaeology of Binding” (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and "Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death: Monstrous Males/Fatal Females" (Lexington Books 2021).  She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University, and when not writing or teaching can be found reading mystery novels amidst a pile of stuffed animals.

On this episode I speak with Dr. Eleanor Paynter about her work in Critical Refugee Studies, including a recent essay on soundwalking, as well as her role as a Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. Dr. Paynter's work focuses on testimony as a multifaceted object: a legalistic framework for migrants seeking refugee status, as well as a mode of expressing agency in creative ways. In this conversation we touch on the so-called "refugee crisis" in Europe, as well as poetry, interdisciplinarity, public scholarship, and more.

Eleanor Paynter is part of the Einaudi Center's Migrations research team, building interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations around the study of migration. She hosts the Migrations initiative podcast, Migrations: A World on the Move.

She graduated from The Ohio State University with a doctorate in comparative studies. Her work is in the area of critical refugee studies, incorporating approaches from narrative, media, and cultural studies to consider experiences and representations of precarious and undocumented migration, asylum, and human rights. Focused on the Black Mediterranean, her research and public writing respond to anti-immigrant racism and postcolonial border dynamics.

Her dissertation received the International Studies Association’s 2021 Lynne Rienner Publishers Award for Best Dissertation in Human Rights. Her current book project examines migration from Africa to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea, drawing on migrant testimonies produced in Italy to reconsider the common framing of irregular migration as a crisis or emergency. In addition, she's collaborating on a project about precarious mobilities and visual culture and is developing a study of European migration governance through social media analysis. Eleanor is also a poet and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Here is some of Dr. Paynter's work that we discussed in this episode:

Other work mentioned in the show:

In this episode I talk with Dr. Christine Capetola about her current book project, Sonic Femmeness: Black Culture Makers, Felt History, and Vibrational Identity. We also discuss different methods of doing music research, as well as critical race theory, affect, and more. 

Here are some links we mentioned in the show:

In this trailer I preview the upcoming season of interviews, and I also read a paragraph from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021).

Check out our website for more info about the show, and please do get in touch with any feedback!