Syllabus
1. Course Introduction: How we got there, from the positivist 70’s to the Roaring 2020’s (2 hours)
2. Race-Diversity-Ethics in the post-George Floyd period (2 hours)
3. Is Czech music White? and other vexing inquiries… (2 hours)
4. Different Approaches What Constitutes Authority in Scholarship: Documents “vs” Theory (2 hours)
5. Ness-ness and Comp. Nat. How nationalism (Czechness, Americanness, Blackness, etc.) affects the brain, and musical scholarship (2 hours)
6. Questions of Evaluation (REF, etc.) and Outreach/Impact in the US and Czech Republic (2 hours)
7. Musicology-Performance-Composition in the Czech Republic today (2 hours)
8. Comparison of conditions in research universities in the U.S. and Czech Republic (2 hours)
9. The University in the Age of Globalization: American and Czech Perspectives (2 hours)
10. Towards the future of musical scholarship (2 hours)
11. Student project presentations 1 (2 hours)
12. Student project presentations 2 (2 hours)
Annotation
This course offers a comparative inquiry into how scholars from the Czech Republic and the USA treat investigations around music scholarship, and more broadly, issues in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. The course, designed for Czech university students in any field, will in particular explore and interrogate more recent American approaches on the heels of the “Covid-Black Lives Matter-Global Warming” period (2020-22), which stress issues around race, social justice, public and medical humanities, and the environment in fields that were already engaged with post-colonialial theory, gender and queer studies. At the same time, it will look at Czech musical culture from the late 70’s to the present and offer several models for where it might be going, exploring where the two worlds intersect and where they differ.