Country Music as Theory: Intersections & Implications for the Humanities and Social Sciences

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. 

Saturday, April 26 — Franke Institute for the Humanities 

9-9:30am | Coffee and pastries

9:30-11am | Mexico, Mexicanidad, and Countryness
Rumya Putcha — “What’s that got to do with Mexico?”: Country Music and the U.S. American Empire
Nadine Hubbs — Country as Quintessentially Mexican American Music
Chris Batterman Cháirez — Corrido Tumbado: Making Sense of Maleficent Media in Michoacán, Mexico

11-11:15am | Coffee

11:15-12pm | Q&A with Mary Cutrufello (Chair: Sumanth Gopinath)

12-1:30pm | Lunch

1:30-3pm | Histories and Intersections
Jocelyn R. Neal — Song Form as Historical Narrative in Country Music
Sumanth Gopinath and Anna Schultz — “Distant Drums”: US Country/Western Music in India, 1960-1990
Amy Skjerseth — What Covers History: Chance the Rapper, Tracy Chapman, and the Country Cover Song

3-3:30pm | Coffee

3:30-5pm | Beyoncé and Black Country Futures
Stephanie Shonekan — This American Life, According to Jolene
Fiona Boyd — KNTRY Radio Texas and Radiophonic Worldbuilding
Jessica Swanston Baker — “You’ll remember me ’cause we got somethin’ to prove”: Cowboy Carter and Beyoncé’s Legacy-Building Project

8pm | Country Music Intersections Concert (Featuring Mary Cutrufello and The Gated Community) | Logan Café

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)