Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Culture
5:00pm - 7:30pm /
Thursday 11th February 2016
/ Venue: First Floor Library, 19-23 Abercromby Square Abercromby SQ (West)
Type: Music /
Category: Department
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EventBrite Registration *Special* Research Event
Thursday 11 February 2016
School of Arts Library, 5-7pm
Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Culture
James Donald's recently published book, Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Culture, has been described as a 'double helix' that presents 'a cultural history of international modernism through interwoven chapters on its two greatest African American Stars, Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.' The book spans the decades from the Jazz Age of the 1920s to the March of Washington in 1963, and pays particular attention to the impact Baker and Robeson had on European artists and intellectuals. Jazz provides the soundtrack, but the book provides new insights into a range of aesthetic forms and practices, including film, dance, theatre and architecture.
To mark the UK launch of Some of These Days, the University of Liverpool's School of the Arts is staging a panel discussion of its themes and ideas. In addition to the author there will be three other guest speakers:
Simon Frith is Tovey Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout his career, both as an academic and as a journalist, he has engaged with the cultural significance of popular music. Among his books are The Sociology of Rock (1978), Sound Effects (1981), Art into Pop (1987), Music for Pleasure (1988), Performing Rites (1996) and Taking Popular Music Seriously (2007). He has been rock critic for both the Sunday Times and the Observer, and he wrote a column for the New York Village Voice from 1980 until 1995. He has chaired the judges of the Mercury Music Prize since it began in 1992.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford and Fellow of New College. Her research interests are predominantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including modernism, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury culture, and literature and film. Among her books are The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association) and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). One of her current research projects is a study of the concept of ’rhythm’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a range of disciplinary contexts.
Sandeep Parmar teaches twentieth-century literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool. She published Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies in 2013 and edited The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees for Carcanet Press (2011). Her research interests are primarily British and American women’s writing of the early twentieth century, modernism, women’s autobiographical writing and the literary archive, with a particular focus on lesser-known, non-canonical women writers. Currently, she is writing a biography of Hope Mirrlees and editing the Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard. As a poet, her work exemplifies a renewed interest among some younger British poets in modernist techniques and approaches pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century.
Wine and nibbles will be served. Places are limited so please book early to avoid disappointment.
Thursday 11 February 2016
School of Arts Library, 5-7pm
Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Culture
James Donald's recently published book, Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Culture, has been described as a 'double helix' that presents 'a cultural history of international modernism through interwoven chapters on its two greatest African American Stars, Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.' The book spans the decades from the Jazz Age of the 1920s to the March of Washington in 1963, and pays particular attention to the impact Baker and Robeson had on European artists and intellectuals. Jazz provides the soundtrack, but the book provides new insights into a range of aesthetic forms and practices, including film, dance, theatre and architecture.
To mark the UK launch of Some of These Days, the University of Liverpool's School of the Arts is staging a panel discussion of its themes and ideas. In addition to the author there will be three other guest speakers:
Simon Frith is Tovey Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout his career, both as an academic and as a journalist, he has engaged with the cultural significance of popular music. Among his books are The Sociology of Rock (1978), Sound Effects (1981), Art into Pop (1987), Music for Pleasure (1988), Performing Rites (1996) and Taking Popular Music Seriously (2007). He has been rock critic for both the Sunday Times and the Observer, and he wrote a column for the New York Village Voice from 1980 until 1995. He has chaired the judges of the Mercury Music Prize since it began in 1992.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford and Fellow of New College. Her research interests are predominantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including modernism, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury culture, and literature and film. Among her books are The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association) and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). One of her current research projects is a study of the concept of ’rhythm’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a range of disciplinary contexts.
Sandeep Parmar teaches twentieth-century literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool. She published Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies in 2013 and edited The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees for Carcanet Press (2011). Her research interests are primarily British and American women’s writing of the early twentieth century, modernism, women’s autobiographical writing and the literary archive, with a particular focus on lesser-known, non-canonical women writers. Currently, she is writing a biography of Hope Mirrlees and editing the Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard. As a poet, her work exemplifies a renewed interest among some younger British poets in modernist techniques and approaches pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century.
Wine and nibbles will be served. Places are limited so please book early to avoid disappointment.