Oct 29 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Promoting Civil Discourse & Intellectual Dialogue Series
Confronting Canons: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Social Justice Relevance
Discussion to surround Catherine Coppola and Elizabeth Wells’ new book.
Description: Canonical dramatic repertoire (e.g., Don Giovanni, South Pacific) has become increasingly fraught as we struggle with the rise and backlash against hashtag social movements, and there are no easy answers to the many questions raised about them. Facing head on those challenges in our teaching and scholarship produces nuanced engagement that rewards grappling with them. From their 2026 book, Teaching Canonic Opera and Musical Theater with Intention, co-authors Catherine Coppola (Hunter College) and Elizabeth Wells (Mount Allison University) will illustrate issues raised in the works with a fresh look at sometimes surprising aspects of context then and now, thus not defending tradition for its own sake, but challenging the fundamentally flawed presumption that today’s society is morally superior to that of 19th- and 20th-century works. Tying canonical content to social justice issues is equally relevant to many other disciplines, thus the book talk will be followed by a conversation exploring those connections with post-colonial scholar Sonali Perera, ethnomusicologist/anthropologist Farzad Amoozejar, and classicist Andrea Kouklanakis.
SPEAKERS
Catherine Coppola is Chair of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program, Lecturer in Musicology, and Acting Director of Chamber Music at Hunter College. Work on sociocultural relevance in opera includes Indiana University’s invited keynote, “Opera and its Discontents: Reflections Of/On the Canon;” the invited chapter, “The Dialogue as Indispensable,” in the Cambridge Companion to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and her new Routledge book Teaching Canonic Opera and Musical Theater with Intention, co-authored with Elizabeth A. Wells. She is at work on an invited chapter for the planned volume, Opera and Trauma: Lenses for the 21st Century, on the University of Michigan’s Music and Social Justice series.
Elizabeth Wells is former Dean and Pickard-Bell Chair in Music at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. She is a Canadian National Teaching Fellow and author of West Side Story: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical, which won the Music in American Culture award from the American Musicological Society. An expert on the music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, she is the editor and contributing author to The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein in Context, and the forthcoming Sondheim in Performance (both Cambridge University Press).
Farzad Amoozejar is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and Assistant Professor at Hunter Colege, whose research lies at the intersection of Islamic philosophy, ethics, the anthropology of death and dying, and sound studies. His work examines how theologically grounded moral frameworks shape experiences of death, disability, grief, and political violence. He is particularly interested in how disabled veterans interpret, narrate, and contest these ethical perspectives, and in how wounded bodies become sites of ethical reflection and political critique. He is currently working on his second book, Bodies of Sacrifice, Voices of Reckoning.
His articles have appeared in Ethos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, Current Anthropology, and Anthropology and Humanism.
Andrea Kouklanakis is an Associate Professor of Classics at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include Homeric poetry, Roman Literature, translation studies, and classics in Afro-Latin America. She is the author of Blemished Kings: Suitors in the Odyssey, Blame Poetics, and Irish Satire (2023). Having written numerous articles on classical reception and race, she has a forthcoming book on the subject as part of the series on classical diaspora from Bloomsbury Publishing. She is also a member of the Hunter Immigrant Solidarity Working Group.
Sonali Perera is the author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2014). She is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate Center, focusing on postcolonial studies, working-class literature, feminist theory, human rights, and globalization studies. Her scholarship appears in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, South Asian Feminisms and The State of Human Rights. Current projects include the monograph Between Imperialism and Internationalism: World Literature and Human Rights, and a co-authored volume on Human Rights. This year she is also a faculty fellow of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center.
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