Keynote speakers

Nicholas Cook, professor in music (University of Cambridge, UK)

Nicholas Cook took up the Professorship of Music in 2009. He was formerly Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and before that taught at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop.

His books, mostly published by Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in twelve other languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking Music (1999), coedited with Mark Everist, and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004); he also coedited the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music with Anthony Pople (2004). His latest book is The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-sièlc Vienna (Oxford, 2007), while two edited collections are in press: Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines, coedited with the dramaturgue Richard Pettengill (Michigan University Press), and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. He is currently writing a book on performance analysis, which will attempt to integrate computational approaches developed at CHARM with those of cultural musicology and inter-disciplinary performance theory; planned projects thereafter includes studies of cross-cultural interaction and creativity in music.

Della Pollock, professor in performance and cultural studies (University of North Carolina, US)

Current Research: Works on two manuscript projects. The first, Visiting Pain, is an intimate ethnography of living with chronic or traumatic pain. Based on informal interview-conversations, it investigates assumptions about the incommunicability of pain, practices of "masquerade," and possibilities for tactical remembering. The second project, Fragments from a Performance Movement, documents a long-term partnership with a local African-American church that has evolved into a multi-faceted drama of social change. The manuscript reflects on the power of performance to catalyze community action, to engage difference across multiple borders, and to articulate history and change, spiritual tradition and claims for equity in/as public pedagogies.

Faculty affiliate: Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Folklore and American Studies.

Areas of Specialization: Brechtian aesthetics and performance for social change; oral history in and as performance; the performance of memory; body politics, feminist/cultural theory; performing writing.

Honors: 2008-11 Bank of America Honors Professorship

2008 University Award for Excellence in Post-Baccalaureate Teaching & Mentoring

2005 Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Leadership Fellow

1998 National Communication Association: Lilla Heston Award for Performance Scholarship

1996 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Allen S. Weiss, associate adjunct professor in performance studies and cinema studies (New York University, US)

Allen S. Weiss is a writer, editor, translator, curator and playwright, and is the author and editor of forty books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theater, including Phantasmic Radio (Duke); Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Wesleyan); Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Errant Bodies). He directed Theater of the Ears (a play for electronic marionette and the taped voice of Gregory Whitehead based on the writings of Valère Novarina) and Danse Macabre (a marionette theater for the dolls of Michel Nedjar). He recently published his first novel, Le Livre bouffon (Le Seuil) and the gastronomic treatise Autobiographie dans un chou farci (Mercure de France). He is now completing the second volume of his culinary autobiography, La métaphysique de la miette, as well as a book on zen gardens, pottery and cuisine. He teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University.