Join us for Food for Thought featuring Francesca Inglese (Associate Professor of Music) and Sylke Rene Meyer (Professor of Theatre and Art+Design). The theme for this month’s Food for Thought is “Embodiment and Creativity.”

Each Faculty member will share a short presentation about their research and lunch will be served. All faculty, staff, and students are welcome. No rsvp required.

Sylke Rene Meyer is a writer, director, media artist, performer, educator, and co-founder of the performance group Studio206 [Berlin/Los Angeles]. In 2018, she also co-founded the performance group ‘The Family Room Collective’ in Los Angeles (2018-2020). Before joining Northeastern University, she has been a professor at the University of Technology, Arts and Sciences, Cologne, Germany, and at California State University in Los Angeles, where she also founded and directed the Institute for Interactive Arts, Research, and Technology (InArt). Sylke recently published her second book with Routledge Press entitled Soviet Narratology and Spatial Story Design: The Unintentional Storyteller. Routledge Press explains that the book delineates how Soviet narratology had a formative–yet somehow unnamed–influence on the development of structuralist and post-structuralist narrative theory, and further cites that this book will be an essential read for academics and artists in performance art, game design, interactive storytelling, narratology, philosophy, but also AI research, and human-machine interaction.

Francesca Inglese is an ethnomusicologist, historian, and musician whose scholarship investigates how African and African diasporic communities deploy sound and embodied practice as vehicles for knowledge production, identity formation, and social transformation. She uses multiple methods and an interdisciplinary lens to analyze how sounds illuminate the uneven global and local dynamics among power, difference, and value, and to center the ways individuals and groups use their creative agency to challenge the social order, create connection and value, and imagine new futures. Her forthcoming book, Remixing Race after Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse in South Africa (Wesleyan University Press’ Music/Culture Series) is an ethnography of Kaapse klopse, a South African carnival tradition, and it uses this genre as a critical lens to explore how sound mediates racial identity in the post-apartheid era. Drawing on immersive fieldwork, interviews, and performance analysis, the book employs methods from sensory ethnography, sound studies, and critical race theory to foreground participants’ lived experiences and aesthetic practices. She has taught at Dartmouth College and Brown University.

Image: Night Watch Radios by Sylke and South African musicians (from Francesca’s book Remixing Race after Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse in South Africa)