Curating for Change on CFRC 101.9 fm: Episode 4 of 5
Recorded: 12 September 2022
Initial broadcast: 13 October 2022
Interviewer: Eric Fillion
Jessica Roda is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist whose research interests include religion, music festivals, the performing arts, cultural heritage, gender, and media. Roda’s articles on these topics have appeared in various scholarly journals and edited volumes in both French and English. She is the author of two books and was the editor of a special issue on music and tourism for MUSICultures. Her most recent book, Se réinventer au present (PUR 2018), was a finalist for the J. I. Segal Award (2020) and received the UQAM-Respatrimoni Prize in Heritage Studies. Her forthcoming monograph, Beyond the Sheytl. Jewish Women, Performances, and the Reshaping of Orthodoxy in the Digital Age (under contract with New York University Press, 2023), investigates how music, films, and media created by ultra-Orthodox and former ultra-Orthodox women allow them to act as agents of social, economic, and cultural change. For this research, she was awarded the Cashmere Award from the AJS Women’s Caucus (2021) and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Award (2021). Roda has served as a visiting fellow and scholar at Université de Paris (Lab Urmis), McGill University, Columbia University (Heyman Center), UCLA (Department of Ethnomusicology), and the State University of Campinas in Brazil. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Conversation US, Times of Israel, La Presse, Radio Canada, France Culture, and numerous networks in Europe, the United States, and South America. Growing up in French Guiana, in a family of Algerian, French, Spanish, and Sephardic heritage, Roda is also a trained pianist, flutist, and modern jazz dancer.
Eric Fillion is adjunct professor and Buchanan postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Queen’s University. His research explores the social and symbolic importance of music, within countercultures and in Canadian international relations. His ongoing work on cultural diplomacy and Canadian-Brazilian relations builds on the experience he has acquired as a musician playing drums with Montreal-based bands in various studios and on international stages. It also informs his current research on the postwar cultural public sphere: his two main projects examine the emergence of the music festival phenomenon in Canada and the entangled sonic histories of diasporic social movements. An affiliate of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI), Eric Fillion is the founder of the Tenzier non-profit archival record label and co-editor of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation. He is the author of JAZZ LIBRE et la révolution québécoise: musique-action, 1967-1975 and Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada’s Cultural Diplomacy. His next book, titled Statesman of the Piano: Jazz, Race, and History in the Life of Lou Hooper (co-edited with Sean Mills and Désirée Rochat), is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.