Current Ph.D. Advisees
Juliet Pascal Glazer, Anthropology And Music
“Sense Experts: Craft, Value, and Contemporary Violinmakers”
This dissertation asks how the circulation of sensory expertise shapes the production of value in a segment of the contemporary Western classical music world. The project focuses on communities of makers and restorers of violin-family instruments on the United States East Coast and in Northern Italy. It draws on twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic research in Boston, New York City, and Cremona, Italy to examine how makers share craft knowledge with one another in their workshops and at violinmaking schools, industry events, and museum exhibitions. Part I of the dissertation follows craft knowledge flows. In Cremona, makers sometimes keep trade secrets because of the city’s competitive market, and they claim local violinmaking heritage to gain cultural and financial capital. On the East Coast, makers share craft knowledge more openly and claim innovative practices to gain cultural and financial capital. Part II of the dissertation examines the sensory techniques violinmakers learn and use. It analyzes visual techniques makers use in their workshops, relations they draw between visual experience and sound, and linguistic strategies they use when collaborating with musicians to achieve desired timbres. The dissertation argues that music economies are composed of interdependent communities of practice with different forms of sensory expertise. It contributes to critical organology, timbre studies, economic ethnomusicology, the anthropology of the senses, and the anthropology of value, demonstrating that both value and materiality depend on learned sensory expertise.
Julia Peters, Theory
“‘Those Females Can Wreck the Infinite’: Queer and Feminine Performance as Sites of Abjection”
This dissertation theorizes a queer and femme musicking in relation to Julia Kristeva’s conception of the abject. Abjection occurs at the site of subjectivization, when the distinction between the subject and the object is blurred; the subject is reminded of her corporeality and the taboos it contains. It both “beseeches and pulverizes the subject” (Kristeva 1982, 5). Vomit, the site of the corpse, the smell of sweat, and menstrual blood are catalysts for this reaction. This dissertation locates feminine performance within the site of abjection. Each chapter is organized by each of the aforementioned “triggers” for abjection, following various methodological approaches including historiographical, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and performance studies.