The UW Music History program presents a guest lecture by Professor Stephen Pennington (Tufts University), "Inconvenient Voices, Inconvenient Identities: Black Trans Revue Girls, Hookers, and Drag Queens of the 1970s"
Biography
Stephan Pennington is an Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. His research interests are concerned with the politics of the performance of identity, and he has presented on a wide range of topics from on the rumba craze in 1930s Germany to appropriation as an historical process. He has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Ethnomusicology Forum, Women & Music, and the 2023 Philip Brett Award Winning edited collection, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness. A pioneering scholar on Transgender Studies in Music, he has been sought out for a number of public intellectual projects, including the documentary No Ordinary Man about trans masculine jazz musician Billy Tipton, and a forthcoming documentary on Black Queer music history, Hiding in Plain Sight. He is currently working on two book projects, one on transgender vocality and the second on the persistence of enlightenment white supremacy in current musicological culture.