Music and the Global American South

Call for papers
Southern Sounds/Out of Bounds: Music and the Global American South
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://globalsouth.unc.edu

Southern Sounds/Out of Bounds: Music and the Global American South aims to bring together graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, and a broader public audience to share current research on the culture, meaning, and practices surrounding music in and from the Global American South. The two-day conference will consider musical import/export, musical manifestation of changing populations, musical meaning contextualized by regional history and contemporary politics, and musical transgressions of boundaries or borders in region, style, genre, and identity.

This conference is part of the ongoing exploration of the globalization of the southern United States that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been pursing for over a decade. Each year this interdisciplinary conference focuses on a different theme to reveal the interplay of the global and the local, both the impacts of globalization on our region and the often surprising ways that local culture and experience influence distant communities and regions.

Special Programming: Karl Hagstrom Miller (University of Texas at Austin) will deliver the Chandler Lecture in Southern Business History as the conference keynote. Performances (ticketed separately) by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Vusi Mahlasela, Abigail Washburn, Kai Welch, and Wu Fei are scheduled.

We invite proposals for papers, panels, and presentations from the full range of disciplines that engage with music and the Global American South. Papers will be scheduled for 20 minutes, with 10 minutes allotted for Q&A or audience discussion. Proposals for alternate formats may include but are not limited to papers in dialogue, collaborative presentations, and moderated roundtable or panel discussions. Alternative-format proposals may be for sessions of 30 or 60 minutes.

Submission: please send as a single PDF attachment to globalsouth@unc.edu
— a cover letter with name, institutional and departmental affiliation (if any), paper title, full contact information including email, phone, and mailing address, and status (faculty, student, independent researcher)
— an abstract of no more than 350 words

Deadline: 16 November 2012

There will be no registration fee for this conference; decisions about proposals will be communicated by mid-December.

– Jocelyn Neal, Director, Center for the Study of the American South, UNC
– Niklaus Steiner, Director, Center for Global Initiatives, UNC