Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We’re deep into Promotion & Tenure season in the college, and it’s been a joy to spend time learning more about our faculty and their research profiles as we’ve been reviewing cases of faculty going up for either tenure or promotion.
As I’ve been working through these cases, I’ve been thinking about how many of our faculty are engaged with their field as leaders and intentionally making their scholarship accessible to a broader public as they advance critical knowledge about creativity into the world. I wanted to share a few examples of our faculty members who have helped share their scholarly work beyond our traditional academic platforms in recent months.
Our most recent issue of Arts Next features a Q&A with Music Theory Professor Eric Drott, who talks about his research for his most recent book, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2023). His new book examines the economics of music streaming platforms like Spotify, and he discusses how this change has reshaped the music industry and how artists make money from their work.
I recently attended two Tower Fellows lectures with Theatre Professor Charlotte Canning, who spoke about a new book she’s working on about Texas theatre history, as well as her most recent book, Theatre and the U.S.A. (Bloomsbury, 2023), and Music Professor Jim Buhler, who spoke about “The Musical World of Star Wars” in his talk. The Tower Fellows program offers a two-semester immersive experience for a small community of accomplished individuals that includes inspiring discussions with world-class thinkers and doers, as well as access to the best courses and professors on campus.
Art History Professor Ondine Chavoya was a MoMA scholar-in-residence last year, and he gave a talk on artist Reynaldo Rivera in conjunction with MoMA’s exhibition Reynaldo Rivera: Fistful of Love/También la belleza. This month, he moderated a panel at MoMA, “Latinx Curators: Shifting Museums, Collections, and Scholarship,” with chief curator and deputy director of curatorial and collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Pilar Tompkins Rivas (B.F.A., Studio Art; B.A., Latin American Studies, 1997), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator and writer María Elena Ortiz (who participated in our Latinx Arts Summit last year) and Whitney Museum of American Art curator Marcela Guerrero.
Fine Arts Professor Francie Ostrower spoke with the Wallace Foundation about her findings on a multiyear research project that delved into audience engagement with performing arts organizations. Ostrower led the study of 24 performing arts organizations participating in the Wallace Foundation’s 2014–2019 Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative, and in the interview, she talks about how performing arts organizations can respond to shifting audience patterns.
Our faculty members’ research is critical in building new knowledge about our world, our disciplines and ourselves as humans. I’m proud of my colleagues and their continued excellence in their respective scholarly areas.
Sincerely,
