Colloquium: Alex E. Chavez (U Notre Dame): “El Disco es Cultura: Sonic Artifacts, Racial Geographies, and Latinx Chicago”

Thursday, November 17, 2022 - 5:00pm
2960 Broadway, 701C Dodge Hall, New York, NY 10027     map

The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is delighted to announce a colloquium talk by Alex E. Chavez, the Nancy O’Neill Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of Sounds of Crossing:  Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke UP, 2017).

Prof. Chavez's talk will be held on Thursday, November 17, 2022, at 5PM EST, in room 701C Dodge Hall on the Columbia University Morningside Campus. 

Prof. Chavez's talk is entitled: 

“El Disco es Cultura: Sonic Artifacts, Racial Geographies, and Latinx Chicago”

When: Thursday November 17, 2022, at 5PM EST (note later time than our usual schedule)
Where: 701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology), Columbia U. Morningside Campus, Broadway at 116th St. (Map Link)

For assistance, information, or special accommodations, contact aaf19 [at] columbia.edu

Please be vaccinated and prepared to wear a mask. 

Speaker Biography:

Artist-scholar-producer, Alex E. Chávez is the Nancy O'Neill Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, expressive culture, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018). And in 2016 he produced the Smithsonian Folkways album Serrano de Corázon (Highlander at Heart).

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of both academic research and publicly-engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores, served as creative consultant for feature films and stage performances, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.
 
In 2020, he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He currently serves as a Governor on the Chicago Chapter Board of the Recording Academy. 

His most recent publication is the article “Gender, Ethno-nationalism, and the Anti-Mexicanist Trope” —published in the 2021 winter issue of the Journal of American Folklore. And he also curated the liner notes for the 8th studio album “Puentes Sonorous” by the Grammy Award-winning group Quetzal (2021). He is co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades (SAR Press), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research in 2019.