Free I No ticket required
Zoom

Mead Witter School of Music Colloquium Series

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Shayna Silverstein (Northwestern University) presents “Ambivalent Notes: Cynicism, Irony, and Incoherence in the Digital Music Culture of the Syrian Conflict.”

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Shayna Silverstein’s research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East. She is currently completing a book manuscript about popular culture in prewar Syria that focuses on how the national performance tradition of dabke engenders belonging across class, religion, and ethnicity. By attending to both the historical trajectories and lived experiences that constitute Syrian popular culture, her book illuminates the ways in which ordinary Syrians negotiate the interrelated logics of postcolonial difference and postsocialist capital and class through body, performance, and culture.

Silverstein’s teaching interests include embodiment, ethnographic methods, ethnomusicology, performance, popular culture, social theory, sound studies, and Middle Eastern studies. Active in several Middle Eastern music ensembles, she plays violin and ‘ud, and has also trained extensively in dance and yoga. Silverstein holds a courtesy appointment in Northwestern’s Program in Middle East and North African Studies.