Please join us for our first Ethnoise! workshop of the winter quarter TODAY, Thursday, January 26, 5–6:30pm CT, Logan 801 featuring Erol Köymen! Erol will be dry-running his job talk so we hope you can come support him and give some feedback.
JOB TALK: “Rethinking Aurality and Embodiment under Global Populism”
Dr. Erol Köymen
Teaching Fellow, Music, University of Chicago
Abstract: In this job talk, I give an overview of my research on aurality and embodiment in Turkish modernity. I focus primarily on my dissertation/book project, Listening for Secular Bodies: The Acoustics of Secularity and Belonging in Neo-liberal Istanbul. This is the first book-length study to bring together literatures on listening and secular bodies. The book draws on over two years of archival and ethnographic research to examine how practices of listening to Western classical music discursively shape sensorial and emotional bodily attunements understood to undergird secular sovereign subjectivity in modern Istanbul. Specifically, I consider how these practices hew and sculpt the borders and boundaries of secular bodies in light of questions of race, class, and urban belonging. Where scholars have argued that listening erodes the boundaries of the body and subjectivity—particularly in Islamicate and postcolonial contexts—my book demonstrates that listening is integral to constructing the boundaries of secular bodies.