Join us in support of our own! Andrea Harris Jordan will be presenting work from her dissertation on Thursday, January 31 in Goodspeed Hall room 205 at 4:30 pm. The background info is attached below. Check out this abstract for starters.
Abstract
My doctoral research explores the intersection of music, literature and nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland and how people intentionally use the past for particular goals in the present. Music, embedded in literature, can serve as a lens to allow us to rethink the ways in which people interpret their history in the present as well as how we write the history of the Irish nation and nationalism. I consider how descriptions of music and music-making, musical notations, and song texts were used in the 1800s within literature to promote nationalist—cultural and political—ends. I ask how Irish people today view their nineteenth-century past in light of music, literature and nationalism. Inherent in my project are issues of violence done to oral traditions and struggles of linguistic representation in the development of Hiberno-English. I address the role of the artist in political movements; gaps and closures between popular arts; efforts and perspectives of a literati class; and questions of gender in national representation. I contribute to ideas and methods of ethnomusicology as I engage in ethnography in the archive and in the field site of contemporary Ireland.
See you soon!