This half-day symposium at UCLA will explore the intersection of sound and hate, focusing on how auditory experiences can propagate, resist, and reflect social animosities. Through discussions and lectures, the event will present unique perspectives on various forms of hate from the lens of sound studies, drawing on diverse fields to examine a wide range of social animosities. The symposium aims to deepen the understanding of how sound influences, challenges, and shapes the dynamics of hate in society.
Our keynote speaker is Shayna M. Silverstein, who is associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies and faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Silverstein’s teaching and scholarship broadly examine the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary Middle Eastern cultural production. Her first book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (2024), shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. Silverstein has also published an award-winning article in the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, among other scholarly contributions. Her publications and research have been supported by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program, as well as the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. Shayna received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in History from Yale University.
She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of
Northwestern University Press and
Ethnomusicology; the Editorial Advisory Board for the
Sound Studies series of Bloomsbury Press; the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Advisory Council; and she is a Co-Chair for the Society for Arab Music Research. Shayna also enjoys playing violin with Tayf Ensemble and Lakeview Orchestra in Chicago.
This event is curated by
Kathryn Agnes Huether, who received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021 and holds a master’s degree in religious studies/Jewish studies from the University of Colorado. She is currently UCLA's Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies. She has held visiting appointments at Vanderbilt University and Bowdoin College and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery. While at UCLA, Huether is researching the roles that sound plays in antisemitic virality on social media, in addition to completing her first book project,
Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, about sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory. This dynamic project draws on memory studies and trauma theory, as well as Musicology, to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of the complex political economy of the Holocaust.
This program is made possible by the Joyce S. and Robert U. Nelson Fund. Robert Uriel Nelson was a revered musicologist and music professor at UCLA, who, together with his wife, established a generous endowment for the university to make programs like this possible.
