Join us on March 19 at 12:00 pm (noon) for the virtual Ziegler Lecture Series, featuring Kira Thurman of the University of Michigan, History Department. This talk is co-sponsored by the UBC School of Music.
Register here via Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rfu2oqz4rHtye15KQ3rDVOs50E9I4XDTM
Title: “Interwar Liederabende and the Matter of Blackness”
Abstract: African American renditions of Brahms or Beethoven offer a powerful musical counternarrative to our historical narratives of European identity formation because what they performed struck right at the heart of German culture and the question of whom it belonged to. Their rigorous study and successful execution of German lieder suggest that, contrary to ongoing far-right biological claims to German national identity, Germanness is something that can be not only performed but also learned.
Bio: Dr. Kira Thurman is Assistant Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the U. Michigan. Her research focuses on the relationship between music and national identity in European history, and Europe’s historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora. Her article, “Black Venus, White Bayreuth: Race, Sexuality, and the De-Politicization of Wagner in Postwar West Germany” won the German Studies Association’s prize for best paper by a graduate student in 2011 and the DAAD prize for best article on German history in 2014. Her current book project is entitled: Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Her work has previously appeared in German Studies Review, the Journal of World History, Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), and Opera Quarterly.
