Cosponsored Event, Lectures

A Greater History of Music in the Age of Enlightenment: Colonial Gaze and Uses of Non-European Acoustic Objects

Decorative image, The Lad Taiyota, Native of Otaheite, in the dress of his Country, from Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty's Ship the Endeavour, London.

Date/Time
Monday, March 6, 2023
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

–lecture on Zoom given by Mélanie Traversier, Professor of Early Modern History at the Université de Lille

Presented by the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory which is generously supported by the Deans of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Department of Political Science. This lecture is co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th– &18th-Century Studies.

Mélanie Traversier is a former member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses on the social history of performing arts in Enlightenment Europe and colonies, especially on the careers of musicians and on the encounters between music, sciences, medicine, and innovation in the 18th century. She has published most recently a monograph L’harmonica de verre et Miss Davies. Essai sur la mécanique du succès au siècle des Lumières (2021), and co-edited two volumes, La musique a-t-elle un genre? (2019), and Spectatrices ! Les femmes au spectacle de l’Antiquité à nos jours (2022). She is also a professional actress (comedy-ballet of Molière, Les Fâcheux). Her next performance is inspired by women alpinists, especially Henriette d’Angeville, the first woman to have successfully climbed Mont Blanc (1838).

RSVP HERE


Image: The Lad Taiyota, Native of Otaheite, in the dress of his Country, from Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty’s Ship the Endeavour, London, Printed for Stanfield Parkinson, the editor, and sold by Richardson and Urquhart, etc., 1773, pl. IX.