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THE SYMPOSIUM
About the Symposium / Concept Note
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The second URiSE International Symposium examines how literary, musical, and sartorial forms shape cultural memory, identity, resistance, and creative expression. Taken together, texts, tunes, and textures influence how communities recall their past, express themselves, push back against dominant narratives, and envision new versions of who they are.
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Taking cues from the critical perspective found in the Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature series, the symposium positions music and literature as both complementary partners and opposing forces: two artistic modes that intersect through rhythm, storytelling, voice, performance, and collective memory. Music is not simply entertainment or background accompaniment; rather, it functions as a mode of thinking, remembering, resisting, and organizing aesthetic experience.
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In a parallel vein, building on the critical questions raised in Elizabeth M. Sheehan’s edited collection Fashion and Literature, the fashion strand treats fashion as more than clothing, style, or decoration. Fashion is approached as a cultural text in its own right, one that participates in constructing identity, embodied experience, memory, gender, race, class, sexuality, modernity, and political affiliation.
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By uniting texts, tunes, and textures, the symposium seeks to build an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary space where scholars, students, artists, performers, designers, and cultural practitioners can explore how literary, musical, and sartorial expressions generate cultural meaning throughout history, society, performance, media, and daily life.