Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation
The School of Music and Dance’s 2025 World Music Series kicks off with Argentine singer-songwriter Cecilia Zabala giving a concert on Thursday, October 2, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. in Berwick Hall. Her spectacle “Colors of the south” is an invitation to celebrate ourselves in the fire of the collective, in the warmth of the embrace. […]
Work-in-Progress talk withLanie Millar, Romance Languages, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. This project examines how contemporary literature, music, and film is rewriting the 500-year history of the Portuguese colonization of Africa and Brazil, by focusing on how African empires and protagonists of African descent shaped the Atlantic world. I analyze how 20th and 21st-century […]
Korean music, in particular K-pop, has become a global phenomenon. Led by performers such as Psy and the group BTS, K-pop and its sounds, dance, and style have become integrated into America’s everyday popular cultural landscape. Korea, however, has a richer history of musical performance, that ranges from court music and folk songs to importation […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Nicholas Forster, Cinema Studies, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow ill Gunn (1929-1989) remains one of the most respected but least recognized artists of the last century. While he was one of the first Black directors ever hired by a Hollywood studio, his career was dotted with accomplishments across media, including work […]
Join us as we embark on a new academic year. Enjoy refreshments. Meet your colleagues and share camaraderie. Learn what OHC has planned for this year.
Global fans of Japanese popular culture are changing universities, giving rise to new curricula and pedagogies and raising new legal and ethical issues for educators. Popular culture is among the main reasons why generations who have come of age since the 1990s are taking Japanese language and culture courses. Students use their knowledge to pursue […]
A longstanding hub of African performing arts, Senegal was at the forefront of the explosion of contemporary dance across Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. In her new book Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal (University of Michigan Press, 2025) Amy Swanson, assistant professor of Dance Studies, Theory, and […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Anita Chari, Political Science, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow This project explores the political implications of the trauma-informed turn and examines the contemporary resonance of trauma in the public sphere as well as the current critical consensus that trauma discourse is part of the problem rather than the solution to our […]
Can Indigenous artists, curators, and historians resist the colonial narrative of art museums when the museum itself is a colonizer institution? Reflecting on his own experience visiting the museum on the Gila River Indian Community, David Martínez argues that the path to resistance lay in the land itself in his talk “There Is No Word […]
Work-in-Progress talk with Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Cinema Studies, and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow In the female-dominant profession of hair styling, women rarely achieve the same visibility as men—even in Hollywood. Using original interviews with hairstylists for performers like Prince and Beyoncé, I highlight the labor behind iconic pop performers on US television. Hair Moves […]
