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Musicologist and anthropologist awarded summer NEH fellowships
Music professor Annegret Fauser and anthropology professor Lorraine Aragon in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences have been awarded $6,000 fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the summer of 2008.
Fauser will pursue a research project on the “Symphonies of War: Music in America during World War II.” Her project has also been chosen for the prestigious NEH “We the People” program, which strengthens the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture. The main focus of her work will be “The Musical Wars of Harold Spivacke,” the former chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Fauser’s project will form the basis of a lecture to be presented in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress this fall as part of a major new lecture series co-sponsored by the Library and the American Musicological Society. The lecture will be broadcast over the Internet.
Fauser has taught a graduate seminar on this topic and will be teaching a UNC honors seminar, “Music in America During World War II” this fall. In April 2008, she gave a plenary address at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., on the topic at an interdisciplinary conference on “The Music of War.”
Aragon’s research project is titled “Indonesian Arts and the Making of Intellectual Property Law.” She previously researched Indonesian artworks for a 1990-1991 international exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
In her project, Aragon will examine new copyright and related laws written for developing nations such as Indonesia, and how intellectual property laws affect the social relations of millions of artists and their audiences worldwide. Indonesian village artists — musicians, dancers, composers, dramatists, puppeteers, carvers and textile designers — want to share their ideas and be imitated as widely as possible, Aragon said. She added that these artists see imitation — the “sharing” of their arts or sharing of cultural knowledge in general — very differently than most North Americans and Europeans do.
“Most Indonesian artists do not simply seek to create valuable property with exclusive owners, as the imported laws imply, but rather they aim to complete ritual actions and show audiences important ways to communicate about inherited forms of creative knowledge and social relationships,” she said.
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants support classroom learning, create and preserve knowledge and bring ideas to life through public television, radio, new technologies, museum exhibitions, and programs in libraries and other community places.