On April 25 and 26, 2025, the University of Chicago will host the Country Music as Theory: Intersections & Implications for the Humanities and Social Sciences conference. This two-day event is co-organized by Music Department Professor and Chair Anna Schultz and PhD student Fiona Boyd, along with Sumanth Gopinath from the University of Minnesota, and will take place primarily at the 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.
The keynote, titled "Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, Mobility and the Unfinished Dream of Black Imaginative Freedom," will be given by Dr. Francesca T. Royster on Friday, April 25 at 11 am, and the conference will conclude on Saturday, April 26 at 8pm with a performance by Mary Cutrufello and The Gated Community.
View the full conference schedule below, and click here to learn more and register.
Friday, April 25
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
Saturday, April 26
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
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)