UNC Music Research Forum

“Desert Specters: Haunting Myths of the Spectacular Bomb in Opera and Film” presented by Assistant Professor Dr. Anna B. Gatdula

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic (2005/2018) are spectacles that produce and reproduce narratives of the United States’ position as a global superpower. These spectacular depictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the genesis of the US nuclear weapons complex hail specific spectators. My work attends to the different media affordances of each form in order to trace the contours of sublimation—how we aestheticize through spectacle and ultimately reify the ideologies structuring the nuclear complex.

The UNC Music Research Forum hosts invited lectures by distinguished music scholars from around the world and informal research presentations by members of our department and colleagues across campus. It serves as an intellectual hub for the department and is open to all. The Forum is held on the final Friday of each month during the semester from 2-4 p.m. in Person Recital Hall.