CEERES

Conference: Music and Marginality in the Balkans: The Edginess of Edges
University of Chicago
January 27-29, 2012

Balkan music is remarkable for its complexity and variety. The preservation of relatively archaic forms such as the Balkan Slavic and Albanian oral epics that gave rise to the Perry-Lord hypothesis is one example, and to date the Albanian oral epic has received much less attention that the Slavic. The rhythmic patterns known as kajda found among Romani musicians in Kosovo also represent an apparently archaic and as yet only minimally investigated tradition. The music of the Gorans—Slavic-speaking Muslims of southwest Kosovo and adjacent Albania whose dialects are closest to Macedonian—has undergone significant change in the past fifty years, but has received very little attention. Similarities among Aromanian, Greek, Macedonian, and Albanian polyphonic vocal music in Epirus and adjacent parts of Macedonia, the rise of Ottoman-folk-Western fusional genres such as tallava among Albanian-speakers, the marginalized but hugely popular genres of chalga in Bulgaria, manele in Romania, and turbo in Serbia (and also Macedonia, Bulgaria, and even Albania) are all in need of investigation, and many younger and more senior ethnomusicologists are working on precisely these topics. Related musical phenomena in Turkey (oriental) and Greece (skyliadhiko) are also relevant. The intersection of traditional and modern, especially beyond the pale or urban elites, is a vital link in understanding both the past and the future of the Balkans. This conference with bring together scholars of these less commonly studied musical genres to both share knowledge and create synergies for new directions in research.

Sponsored by CEERES, the CSRPC, CIS, the Dept of Music, the Dept of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

The University of Chicago will be hosting the next meeting of the MRHW on April 20-21, 2012. This meeting will give us the special opportunity to celebrate Sheila Fitzpatrick’s contributions to the workshop and to wish her well as she prepares to retire and move to Australia.

John Bushnell will be compiling the program for the conference; if you would like to present a paper, please contact him (j-bushnell@northwestern.edu) no later than February 1, 2012. The organizers ask that paper-givers limit their contribution to 30 pages, and that they be prepared to submit their papers by March 26, 2012 in order to give all participants time to read their contribution.

Whether or not you plan to give a paper, please let Faith Hillis know
(hillis@uchicago.edu) by February 15, 2012 if you plan to attend the conference. If you are a graduate student and would like the organizers to try to match you with a graduate student host at no charge, please let Prof Hillis know that too when you RSVP.

CALL FOR PAPERS

27th Annual Middle East History and Theory (MEHAT) Conference

The University of Chicago, May 4-6, 2012

The MEHAT (http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/mehat/) Conference is celebrating its twenty-seventh year as a leading forum for emerging scholars in Middle East studies. The conference organizing team invites graduate students and faculty in the humanities and social sciences to submit papers. MEHAT welcome’s a broad range of submissions from across the disciplines (including, but not limited to, anthropology, art history, cinema and media studies, history, literature, sociology, and religion) dealing with any topic that has affected the Middle East from the 7th century onwards.

If you wish to participate, please send a 250-word abstract to the conference organizers at mehat2012 (at) gmail.com by February 1, 2012. They will consider both individual papers and prearranged themed panels; the latter is especially encouraged. Please also email the organizers if you have questions.