Monday, May 30, 2011

PCI Annual lecture (Spring) - May 30, 2011

Speaker:
Prof. Iain Chambers (Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Oriental University, Naples, Italy)


Date: May 30
Time: 15.00-18.00
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal

Title: The Mediterranean and maritime criticism

Responses: dr. Monica Jansen (UU, DMT Italian Studies) and 
Prof. Emile Wennekes (UU, MCW, Musicology) 
Dr. Barbara Titus, Assistant Professor of Musicology, UU

Abstract
Thinking the Mediterranean in a multifold complexity of ‘overlapping territories and intertwined histories’ (Edward Said) encourages a critical journey that abandons the securities of territorial homelands for the open and less guaranteed routes of intercultural travel. Taking the sea as a composite archive and site of historical and cultural crossings, this talk, further encouraged by the critical affectivities of contemporary literatures, music and the visual arts, will propose some historical and cultural perspectives on a postcolonial Mediterranean.


Bio
Iain Chambers is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in ‘Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world'. Iain Chambers is internationally known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean.
Professor Chambers has a degree in History and American Studies from Keele University, and subsequently acquired an MA at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has lived in Naples since 1976, and has held visiting professorships at Hunter College (CUNY) in 1990, the University of Oslo in 1992, in Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine in 1995, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2008. He has also been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz in 1994; been invited as Visiting Scholar at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles for the year 1996-7; and been a Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine in 1997.
He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture (Palgrave Macmillan,1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience (Routledge,1986), Border dialogues: Journeys in postmodernity (Routledge, 1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (Routledge, 1994), Hendrix, hip hop e l'interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) (Costa & Nolan, 1995), Culture after humanism (Routledge, 2001); and most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008). He is also editor with Lidia Curti of The Post-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (Routledge, 1996) and the volume Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (Meltemi, 2006). Several of these titles have been translated into various languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese and Turkish. In addition Professor Chambers has served on the editorial boards of Formations, Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Communal Plural, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, and Third Text.