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.
Livestream: https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/school-of-music-live-streams/#lani-hall
Click here for a link to Mini-Presentation abstracts and readings for the conversation to follow.
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.
This event is curated by Kathryn Agnes Huether, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She earned her PhD in musicology with a minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota (2021) and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was a 2021–2022 Mandel Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Her research examines how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and contemporary politics. She has published in Sound Studies and Yuval, guest edited Sounding Out! on “Hate and NonHuman Listening,” and has forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Music and Politics. She has organized national scholarly initiatives, including the 2025 roundtable “Music, Silence, and Social Action in an Age of Perpetual Crisis,” and represented UCLA at the Eradicate Global Hate Summit. She is a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s Virtual Speakers Bureau and has been an invited educator at two of its regional institutes. She currently edits ISH’s public-facing blog.
Her first book, Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, is in progress. Her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film (Indiana University Press), is forthcoming.
This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate.