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THEME Lecture: Catherine Appert: Diasporic Flows: Voicing Social Change in Hip Hop Time

Friday, November 15, 2019 - 3:30pm
FREE
Guest Lecturer: Catherine Appert, Cornell University

Drawing on ethnographic research in Dakar, Senegal, this talk explores hip hop as a social practice of musical genre that works to remember and reinvent histories of diasporic connection, and to mobilize them in the pursuit of immediate and material social change.

Catherine Appert

Catherine M. Appert holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology with a graduate certificate in Women's Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

 Her research on popular music in Senegal and The Gambia centers on questions of globalization, migration, and diaspora, the ethnographic study of musical genre, popular music and gender, and the intersections of music and memory. Other research interests include feminist and urban ethnography; global hip hop cultures; and African, Atlantic, and postcolonial studies. Her book, In Hip Hop Time: Music, Memory, and Social Change in Urban Senegal was published in December 2018 on Oxford University Press.

Appert’s research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies with the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, , the UCLA International Institute, the Cornell Humanities Council, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the President’s Council of Cornell Women. Her articles appear in Ethnomusicology, Africa, and New Literary History, and she has chapters forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music and  Rap Français:  Hip Hop Music and Culture in the Francophone World. She has presented her research at numerous annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Anthropological Association, the African Studies Association, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. She was awarded the Charles Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2011, and received the SEM Popular Music Section’s Richard Waterman Prize for her 2016 article, “On Hybridity in African Popular Music: The Case of Senegalese Hip Hop.” Her 2017 article, "Engendering Ethnomusicology," received an honorable mention for the Marcia Herndon Prize, which recognizes exceptional work in the ethnomusicology of sexuality and gender. 

At Cornell, she teaches courses on hip hop aesthetics and performance, global hip hop cultures, African and African diasporic musics, postcolonial theory, migration and globalization, and ethnographic theory, methods, and writing.


About this Series

THEME: A colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, Music Education hosted on select Friday afternoons in Autumn Quarter


Upcoming Events in this Series:

Friday, Dec. 6
Shannon Dudley (University of Washington)
Bridging Campus and Community Through Participatory Arts


All sessions are from 3:30 to 5 pm in the School of Music Fishbowl Conference Room (Music Room 101).

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