This dissertation develops a methodology for understanding tonality and tonal structures in Renaissance polyphony by exploring the ways that the modern-day analyst and listener experience tonal phenomena in this music through a historically-informed lens. Regarded as one of the most important composers of the late-sixteenth century, Tomás Luis de…[Read more]

In this paper, presented at the 2022 H-Net Teaching Conference, I describe how I teach undergraduate students about disability in music through what I call disclosure-oriented pedagogy. This practice involves demonstrating cross-historical comparisons between my lived experiences of disability and the representations of disability in 19th-century…[Read more]

It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between s…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

No creo que haya mejor ocasión que este homenaje alcalaíno al maestro Alberto Blecua para vencer las reticencias y dudas del neófito que, en palabras de Márquez Villanueva, ha de pisar por vez primera los “senderos de alto riesgo” por los que camina el Libro de buen amor. Por motivo de mi admiración y reconocimiento al homenajeado, voy a dejarme…[Read more]

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

I’ve written and produced a series of 18 analytical videos about the Rite of Spring (roughly twelve hours of video) and posted them on a YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChmyFZItS6HNVYyFwOUZo4Q

The first five videos deal with aspects of the work as a whole (meaning, form, melody, harmony, rhythm). The last thirteen videos a…[Read more]

I’m a disability activist and musicologist with multiple sclerosis (PhD, Musicology, Cornell, 2014). I’m unaffiliated due to discrimination against my disabilities. However, I often give guest lectures, both virtually and in person. My speaking engagements help to advance diversity and representation in academia: I offer students the opportunity…[Read more]

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomp…[Read more]

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

Book review

In “Hwabyung Fragments” the Korean American poet Seo-Young Chu uses pieces of Korean mythology, family lore, DMZ iconography, speculative lyricism, allusions to Plato’s Symposium (the figure of one’s missing other half), and allusions to chimerism, mosaicism, and twinning to explore generational trauma, Korean division, postmemory han, the…[Read more]

A pesar que puga semblar una mica pueril, crec que he de començar aquest treball amb una asseveració rotunda: el Cancionero general no es va editar a València per casualitat. Les edicions de 1511 i 1514 no van ser solament el resultat del moltes vegades problemàtic pelegrinatge vital dels erudits literaris de l’època que, com Hernando del Castil…[Read more]

El 22 de desembre de 1509, l‘erudit castellà Hernando del Castillo, el mercader genovés Lorenzo Ganoto i l’impressor Cristóbal Cofman firmaven a la ciutat de València, davant el notari Joan Casanova, el contracte de la primera edició del Cancionero general, que va veure la llum finalment l’any 1511. En esència, la distribució del treball era…[Read more]

El presente trabajo presenta un panorama de síntesis biográfica con respecto a los poetas valencianos presentes en el Cancionero general de Hernando del Castillo. Asimismo, los poemas que contienen temas típicos de Valencia también son analizados, con el objetivo de estimular un mayor conocimiento de los hombres y la ciudad en cuyo entorno cul…[Read more]