(Re)Imagining Spaces: Migration, Identity and Memory

Invited Speakers

Josh Kun

Professor Kun's research focuses on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, the cultures of globalization, the US-Mexico border, and Jewish-American musical history. He is director of The Popular Music Project (www.usc.edu/pmp) at USC Annenberg's The Norman Lear Center and co-editor of the book series "Refiguring American Music" for Duke University Press. He serves on the boards of Dublab, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Latin American Cinemateca, and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, the International Journal of Communications, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. He has also worked as a consultant and curator with The Los Angeles Public Library, Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Autry National Center, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Dorothy Noyes

Dorothy Noyes is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Studies, Director of the Center for Folklore Studies, and Research Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. She works on the history of folk voice as a dimension of the modern public sphere, concentrating on the Romance-speaking Mediterranean. She has written extensively on the interaction of state and local actors in both collective performance and knowledge institutions, the tension between performance and heritage, and, in her current work, the social organization of creativity. Her most recent book is Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and winner of the 2005 Book Prize of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society. She has taught as a visitor at Penn, Indiana, NYU, and the universities of Barcelona, Göttingen, and Cluj. Elected Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 2005, she has served on the AFS Executive Board and now serves on that of the Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore. Course topics include folklore theory, performance, the cultural history of waste and recycling, American regional cultures, festival, and fairy tale.