Inna Naroditskaya: "Russian Empresses Navigating Gender, (Con)fusing Operatic and Political Spaces"

Si invitano colleghi, studenti e dottorandi
all’incontro con la

Prof.ssa Inna Naroditskaya
(Northwestern University)

che terrà una lezione dal titolo

Russian Empresses Navigating Gender,
(Con)fusing Operatic and Political Spaces

Giovedì 7 febbraio 2019 – Sala convegni, ore 15.00

Bio-bibliographical profile
Inna Naroditskaya is Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University.
She began her musical career as a performing pianist and musicologist in the former Soviet Union. Then she immigrated to the US and completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan.
She is a specialist in Azerbaijani and Eastern music cultures, Russian music, gender studies, and diasporas. She wrote several articles and volumes about these topics.
Her first book – Song from the Land of Fire: Azerbaijani Mugham in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods (2003) – reflects her approach to music as an active force in politics. She analyses Azerbaijani music as an insight into the turbulent transitions which led Azerbaijan to become an independent State, as well as exploring gender dynamics, and political aspirations within networks of local families.
Music and gender is a major theme in her research. In her much-praised volume Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage (2012), Professor Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her study traces the tsarinas’ deeply invested interest in musical drama. Through contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical theater productions illuminates the transition of these royal women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal dominance of the subsequent period.
Active in the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), Professor Naroditskaya served as author and co-editor of two volumes produced by the Music and Minority group (of ITCM) – Manifold Identities (2004) and Music and Minorities (2018).
Her latest edited volume – Music in the American Diasporic Wedding (2018) – explores the complex cultural adaptations, preservations, and fusions that occur in weddings between couples and families of diverse origins.
She is recipient of Center for the Education of Women prize, Rackham research grant, and funding from the International Institute and School of Music at the University of Michigan.
In addition to scholarship, Professor Naroditskaya has written articles and OpEds for a wide readership in The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and Pacific Standard.
personal website: https://www.music.northwestern.edu/faculty/profile/inna-naroditskaya