The “Ottoman-American” Diaspora: Women in Early Musical Recordings, ca. 1917–47

Please note the new location: Abernethy Room

Ian Nagoski is an independent music researcher and reissue record producer in Baltimore, Maryland, who has specialized for over 20 years in early-twentieth-century recordings made by immigrants to the United States, with a particular focus on musicians from the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman locales. The latter have included Greek, Armenian, Arab, Jewish, and Turkish musicians. He has made anthologies for Dust-to-Digital, Tompkins Square (including “To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora” in 2011), the Database of Recorded American Music, Mississippi Records, and his own Canary imprint, which has released over 165 digital albums. He has toured widely as a speaker from Thessaloniki to Fresno. He has given talks at the Library of Congress, Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, UCLA,  the University of Chicago, the Armenian Museum in Watertown, MA, and the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, among many others.

Event sponsored by the Axinn Center for the Humanities and Mellon Humanities for All Times Initiative, the Department of History, the Department of Arabic, the Department of Music, and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies