Devon will host a seminar focusing on her work on popular music critics, and the process of sound and music criticism more generally. She will also speak to the ways in which the line between academic and popular criticism blurs, and a recent special issue of Popular Music she co-edited called “The Critical Imperative” which called for writing about popular music that placed primacy on sounds as made and heard, and which was styled in a way that foregrounds not just academic rigor, but also imaginative description, creative interpretation and daring evaluation. While criticism is increasingly marginalized in the mainstream media, many writers and readers have constructed new spaces for musical reflection online and this discourse, as sophisticated as it is public, represents a challenge to academic work on pop ensconced behind university paywalls.

Devon Powers is Associate Professor of Advertising, Temple University. She is the author of Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), and co-editor of Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture (Peter Lang, 2010).  Her research explores historical and contemporary consumer culture and the dynamics of cultural intermediation, circulation, and promotion. Recent work has appeared in Journal of Consumer Culture, New Media & Society, and Popular Communication; she is currently at work on a book about trends.

This event is sponsored by SoundStudies@UW, a Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshop in the Humanities, with support from the Center for the Humanities.