Sounding Korea’s Hiroshima: Song and Verbal Art among Korean Radiation Sufferers

Date: 

Thursday, April 2, 2015, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Korea Colloquium

Joshua D. Pilzer, Associate Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Music

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Born in Vancouver, he grew up in Nashville, Tennessee as a popular musician. He earned his bachelor's degree at the Evergreen State College in interdisciplinary studies, and degrees in ethnomusicology from the University of Hawai'i (MA) and the University of Chicago (PhD). His research focuses on the anthropology of music in modern Korea and Japan, and the relationships between music, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, socialization, gendered violence, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” and in both theoretical and analytical approaches to the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. Since 2011, he has been doing summer and research-leave fieldwork for an ethnography of music and song among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan, which will be his second book project. He has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Dongyang Umak Yeonggu, and The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). At the University of Toronto he teaches graduate seminars on music and everyday life; the social poetics of music; music, culture, and health; the music anthropology of the imagination, and others.

Chaired by Nicholas Harkness, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University

Co-sponsored by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

Generously supported by the Min Young-Chul Memorial Fund at the Korea Institute.