Events & Calendars Confronting Race in Arts Research: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation

Join us for a conversation with Dwight Carey, assistant professor of art and the history of art; Ana Carneiro, visiting artist in playwriting, theater and dance; and Amy Coddington, assistant professor of music, moderated by Darryl Harper, associate professor of music and director of the CHI. The panelists bring cross-disciplinary perspectives to the conversation about acknowledging and redressing racism in arts research and pedagogy. Following the panel, there will be a Q&A.

Speakers:
Dwight Carey, Assistant Professor of Art and the History of Art
Professor Dwight Carey’s research examines the built environments of slavery. In collaboration with Professor Peter Crowley in the geology department, Professor Carey has been chemically analyzing samples of mortar, plaster, coral, stone and wooden flooring from 18th-century buildings on the island of Mauritius. Through comparing these results with archival information on the skills that slaves possessed in masonry, woodworking and coralsmithing, Professor Carey is developing a natural resource history of Mauritian architecture: a history of the island that accounts for the ways in which architectural knowledge and labor rendered slaves the mavens of the land, the masters of a vast island that only they understood.

Amy Coddington, Assistant Professor of Music
Amy Coddington’s research investigates how the music industry influences musical expression. Her current book project, How Hip-Hop Became Hit Pop, explores the commercial radio industry’s role in making hip-hop mainstream. She explores how hip-hop’s move into the mainstream also expanded the possibilities for how artists sounded their racial identities, and, ultimately, transformed how audiences conceived of their own racial identities in an increasingly multicultural America.

Ana Candida Carneiro, Visiting Artist in Playwriting, Theater and Dance
Ana Carneiro is an award-winning playwright whose works touch on themes like social justice, globalization, immigration, culture clash, gender inequity and climate change, using multiple and invented languages, heterogeneous linguistic registers and genres, and are increasingly marked by experimentation with the dramatic form. She writes in English, Italian and Portuguese and frequently collaborates with other artists, markedly composers. Her current book project, The Global Playwriting Workbook, complies and catalogs exercises and methods used by teaching playwrights from around the world.

Darryl Harper, Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Darryl Harper is a jazz musician interested in how race, culture and political economy intersect with music. His current projects include an article on the social agenda attached to the formation of the jazz program at New England Conservatory in the late 1960s, namely, to integrate black students into the conservatory.