Keynote Speakers
Keynote Speaker Biographies
Burt Feintuch directs the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. With research interests that include traditional music, public culture, ethnography, and cultural revivals, he has edited and written books, articles, and reviews on a variety of topics in folklore studies. Appointed by the Librarian of Congress, he serves on the National Recording Preservation Board. With David H. Watters, he is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of New England (2005), named one of the best nonfiction works of the year by a number of media. Feintuch has done fieldwork in a number of communities, ranging from African-American gospel musicians to various European-American groups to regional musicians in the North East of England. He has produced sound recordings, most recently for Smithsonian Folkways and Rounder. A musician himself, in recent years he has been doing research in the Cape Breton fiddle tradition.
Keynote Speech: "A Conversation with Brenda Stubbert."
Tuesday, August 5 at 11:00 AM at the DF Cook
Recital Hall, School of Music
Alan Jabbour was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida. A violinist by early training, he put himself through college at the University of Miami playing classical music. While a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began documenting oldtime fiddlers in the Upper South. Documentation turned to apprenticeship, and he relearned the fiddle in the style of the Upper South. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968, he taught English, folklore, and ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1968-69. He then moved to Washington, D.C., for over thirty years of service with Federal cultural agencies. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress 1969-74, director of the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts 1974-76, and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress 1976-99. Since his retirement, he has turned enthusiastically to a life of writing, consulting, lecturing, and playing the fiddle.
Keynote Speech: "Fiddle Revivals of the C20th: A Fertile Field for Research and Documentation"Sunday, August 3 at 6:55 PM at the DF Cook Recital Hall, School of Music
Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, FRSC, is Professor of Music and Director of the FolkwaysAlive Project as well as founder and director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology. A cellist and sarangi player, she is interested in the poetics and politics of music and has published widely on South Asian and Islamic performance practices, including Sufi Music in India and Pakistan : Sound, Context and Meaning in Qawwali and the co-edited Muslim Society in North America and Muslims Families in North America. Her research in oral tradition and political economy includes the edited volume Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, and Master Musicians of India: Hindustani Sarangi Players Speak. Her interest in women musicians extends from the co-edited Voices of Women: Essays in Honor of Violet Archer, to her current book project Female Agency and Patrilineal Constraints: Situating Courtesans in 20th Century India.
Keynote Speech: "The Indian Sarangi: Soulful Sound, Contested
Meaning."
Thursday, August 7 at 11:00 AM at the DF Cook Recital Hall, School of Music
Owe Ronström is a musician and professor in Ethnology at Gotland University in Sweden . He has written a great deal on music, dance, ethnicity, multiculture, age, and heritage, and has produced a film on Calus, a dance and music ritual in Romania. He has also produced several hundred radio broadcasts for the Swedish Broadcasting Coorporation on music from around the world—most recently in the series Mimer i P2, broadcasted weekly 2006 and during summer 2007. He has published many articles and books, the latest of which is Heritage Politics (working title). He is also active as a musician in the bands Orientexpressen, Gunnfjauns kapell, and as director of Gotlands Balalajkaorkester.
Keynote
Speech: "Fiddles: From Tradition
to Heritage."
Friday, August 8 at 11:00 AM at the DF Cook Recital Hall, School of Music
Ian Russell is the Director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen. This institute specialises in folklore and ethnology (see www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone). His current research is focused on the traditional culture of North-East Scotland, including singing traditions, instrumental traditions (flute bands, free reed instruments, fiddles), Travellers’ traditions, monologues/recitations, and local craft skills including the building of model sailing luggers, known as ‘boaties’. He has also conducted extensive fieldwork into singing traditions in the English Pennines, especially Christmas carolling. He was the convenor of NAFCo in 2001 and 2006, and is the co-editor with Mary Anne Alburger of Play It Like It Is: Fiddle and Dance Studies from around the North Atlantic (Aberdeen, 2006).
Keynote Speech:"Understanding Performing Culture: The Fiddle in a North Atlantic Context."
Monday, August 4 at 11:00 AM at the DF Cook Recital Hall, School of Music