University of North Carolina Center for Global Initiatives

Southern Sounds/ Out of Bounds: Music and the Global American South

The Music and the Global American South conference is presented by the Center for Global Initiatives and the Center for the Study of the American South in collaboration with Carolina Performing Arts.

Music and the Global American South aims to bring together graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, and a broader public audience to share current research on the culture, meaning, and practices surrounding music in and from the Global American South.  The two-day conference will consider musical import/export, musical manifestation of changing populations, musical meaning contextualized by regional history and contemporary politics, and musical transgressions of boundaries or borders in region, style, genre, and identity. 

Special Programming includes:

• Karl Hagstrom Miller, delivering the keynote Chandler Lecture in Southern Business History: “A Talking Machine World: Dreaming about the Future of Music at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.” 
• Artists' conversation with Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei on their combinations of traditional US Appalachian music with Chinese traditional music.
• Performances by the Carolina Chocolate Drops with Vusi Mahlasela, and Abigail Washburn with Kai Welch and special guest Wu Fei.  

The conference is free with registration.  Tickets are available for purchase through Carolina Performing Arts both performances. Conference registrants will receive a code for 20% off performance tickets while they last!

This conference is part of the ongoing exploration of the globalization of the southern United States that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been pursing for over a decade. Each year this interdisciplinary conference focuses on a different theme to reveal the interplay of the global and the local, both the impacts of globalization on our region and the often surprising ways that local culture and experience influence distant communities and regions.