April 25, 2025 | 10:15AM
Franke Institute for the Humanities
The Country Music as Theory conference will convene scholars of country and adjacent sounds, histories, geographies, and materialities from diverse disciplines to work both towards an understanding of country music’s complexity and underexamined corners as well as its place in and potential for contemporary theory and scholarship.
Friday, April 25 — Franke Institute for the Humanities
10:15-10:45am | Coffee and pastries
10:45-11am | Welcome
11-12:30pm | Keynote
Francesca T. Royster — Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Mobility and the Unfinished Dream of Black Imaginative Freedom
12:30-1:30pm | Lunch
1:30-3pm | Charting Industries
Jada Watson — Billboard Charts and 1990s Country: The Myth of Neutrality
Travis A. Jackson — Tune In: “Nashville” vs. Nashville
Chelsea Burns — The Stuff of Bluegrass: Billy Strings in the Contemporary Music Market
3-3:30pm | Coffee
3:30-4:30pm | Queerness and Critique
Emily Williams Roberts — “Why Did I Have to Leave Home Just to Hear You Say My Name?”: Queer Reframings of Nostalgia in Bluegrass Lyricism
Jacob Kopscienski — Hearing Place/Feeling Structures: Quare Affects and Strategies in Appalachia and Americana
Learn more and register to attend at voices.uchicago.edu/country.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Music, Franke Institute for the Humanities, UChicago GRAD, Logan Center for the Arts, The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, Committee on Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS), Committee on South Asian Studies, and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.
Artwork: Connie Fox, “I Sense the Winds that are Coming” (1996)