The Syracuse University Humanities Center, based in the College of Arts and Sciences, wraps up February with a quartet of high-profile events. It features visits by Jonathan Dueck, an award-winning ethnomusicologist at The George Washington University (GW); Alicia Garza, founder of the Black Lives Matter movement; Lori Emerson, a media archeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Gloria Joseph, a legendary black feminist.  

All events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. For more information, visit syracusehumanities.org or call 315-443-7192.

“We are proud to finish off the month with four highly distinguished guests,” says Vivian May, director of the Humanities Center and associate professor of women’s & gender studies. “Common to all of them is a deep appreciation for the humanities in American public life. Whether their work is disciplinary or interdisciplinary, it has transformative potential, and seeks to reimagine the nature and scope of engaged scholarship.” 

On Monday, Feb. 22, Dueck will discuss “Players on the Field: Thinking About Musical Humanity Through Sport” at 2:15 p.m. in The Kilian Room (500) in the Hall of Languages. At 4 p.m., he will lead a private Mini-Seminar in Room 304 of the Tolley Humanities Building titled “Musical Methods for Teaching and Researching Movement in Sport.” Both events are sponsored by the Department of Art & Music Histories (AMH) in A&S.

Dueck is both an assistant professor of writing and the deputy director of Writing in the Disciplines at GW, where he studies, among other things, musical practices among affinity groups. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and is a regular contributor to several scholarly publications, including Ethnomusicology, the Journal of American Folklore, and Popular Music and Society.

The following day (Tuesday, Feb. 23), Garza will deliver the University’s Black History Month Commemorative Lecture at 7 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel. The renowned social activist is expected to address the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman (a white Hispanic) in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin (a black teenager), which prompted her to use social media to express her love and anguish for the black community. Ending her message with “Our Lives Matter / We Matter / Black Lives Matter,” she helped turn those powerful last words into a Twitter hashtag. Today, Black Lives Matter is an Internet-driven civil rights movement.

Currently the special projects director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Garza formerly served as executive director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights. Her visit is sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

The week continues with a two-day residency by Emerson, founder of the Media Archeology Lab, as well as associate professor of English and of Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance at CU Boulder. Part of the 2015-16 Syracuse Symposium, whose theme is “Networks,” her visit gets underway on Thursday, Feb. 25, with a lecture titled “Other Networks: Hands-on History in the Media Archeology Lab” at 5 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons (Room 114) of Bird Library. The next day, she will participate in a private Mini-Seminar titled “Internet, Darknet, Alternet // The Past, Present, and Future of Cooperatively Run Networks” from 9 a.m. to noon in Room 304 of the Tolley Humanities Building.

Emerson writes about media poetics, as well as the history of computing, media archaeology, media theory, and digital humanities. She is the author of multiple book projects, including The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) and Other Networks (forthcoming), a history of telecommunications networks before and outside of the Internet. Her visit is co-sponsored by Syracuse University Libraries, AMH and The Writing Program (both in A&S), and the Office of Research.

On Monday, Feb. 29, Joseph will visit the Community Folk Art Center (805 East Genesee St.) from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. During her visit, the iconic feminist will read from her acclaimed book, The Wind Is Spirit: The Life, Love, and Legacy of Audre Lorde (Villarosa Media, 2014), honoring the memory of her lifelong partner. Part biography and part anthology, the book features essays, poems, and reflections about Lorde, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” who died in 1992.

Joseph is professor emeritus of Africana studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. She is widely known for her cross-cutting pedagogical style, combining arts and activism. Her reading is sponsored by the Democratizing Knowledge Collective in A&S, and is followed by a reception and book-signing.

The Humanities Center is located in the Tolley Humanities Building, and is a hub of humanities research, fellowships, and public programming. Click here for the complete Spring 2016 schedule.