The Performance Studies Research Group is hosting Dr Susan Fast, of McMaster University's Department of English and Cultural Studies, on March 19 from 3-4pm in UC 224A. Dr Fast, whose current SSHRC-funded research initiative explores the politics of representation in the work of all-girl rock tribute bands, will be delivering a talk entitled "Theorizing the Copy: Gender, Virtuosity, and Originality in Tribute Band Performances." Dr Fast will speak for approximately 20-25 minutes, and will then open the floor to a broader discussion of the issues her paper will raise. Please mark your calendars, and encourage your students to join us for what will be a stimulating paper and discussion!
Susan Fast is a musicologist, who began her academic career as a Medievalist, with a focus on the Aristotelian-influenced scholasticism of the late 13th and early 14th centuries in Northern France. Her focus shifted to popular music in the mid 1990’s, and has, since then, been focused on constructions of identity in popular music performance; theoretical perspectives from performance studies have been particularly influential in her work. She has produced two books, the first of which is a critical edition of the fourteenth-century treatise Musica speculativa, by the Parisian music theorist and mathematician Jean de Meurs (published by the Institute of Medieval Music, 1994). She is also author of In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, 2001), a collection of essays that explores the body in performance, gender and sexuality, cultural appropriation/hybridity, and ritual/mythology in rock music. Her publications also include articles on Live Aid and cultural memory, constructions of authenticity in U2, Tina Turner’s gendered and racialized identity in the 1960’s, issues of feminism and rock criticism, and on the mass-mediated benefit concerts that appeared after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Her current project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates issues related to gender, race and normative genre boundaries in all female tribute bands to hard rock and heavy metal.
