Thinking Through Music & Fashion

This colloquium is part of Thinking Through the Arts, a two-day series that gathers emerging scholars to discuss the interplay between the arts, the world around us, and our inner lives. Sponsored by Veritas Forum and Regent College, these events are free and open to the public.

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us at Regent College (Room 2) to hear from emerging scholars in the fields of music and fashion as they discuss the interplay between the arts, beliefs, and societies. Three 30-minute presentations will be followed by questions and discussion.

• Nicholas Chong, Beethoven and the Catholic Enlightenment: Rethinking Musical Modernity
• Andrew Chung, Music’s Long Anthropocene: The Climate of Empire and the Sound of Ecological Disaster
• Fiona Dieffenbacher, Fashion—Interfaith Dialogues in Academia

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Nicholas Chong is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the undergraduate Core Curriculum at Columbia University. Chong specializes in the music of the late Classical and Romantic eras in Germany and Austria, with a particular focus on the ways in which the creation and reception of musical works relate to religious, political, and intellectual history. His first monograph, The Catholic Beethoven, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. With Daniel K. L. Chua, he is also co-editor of Rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment, under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Andrew Chung serves as Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of North Texas. His scholarly work specializes in the history and theoretical analysis of 20th and 21st-century European and American art music in experimental and avant-garde traditions. With a BA in music and neuroscience & behavior from Wesleyan University and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in music from Yale University, Dr. Chung has strong interdisciplinary interests. His publications appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, Resonance: A Journal of Sound and Culture, and Sound Studies. His 2019 article, “What is Musical Meaning? Towards a Theory of Music as Performative Utterance” in Music Theory Online was a winner of the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2022. He is currently working on a book manuscript called Music’s Long Anthropocene: The Climate of Empire and the Sound of Ecological Disaster.

Fiona Dieffenbacher is an Associate Professor of Fashion and Associate Dean in the School of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, where she teaches a range of fashion courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. Her research is located at the intersection of dress, embodiment, and spirituality, with a particular emphasis on the ‘space in between’ theory and practice. In 2020, she founded The En[…]Clothed Collective, a global group of practitioners, poets, artists, and researchers who center bodily knowledge as a practice in order to articulate theory, and in 2023 she launched a public program entitled Fashion-Faith: Rituals and Dialogues that aimed to open up conversation across faith based practices. The second edition of her book Fashion Thinking: Creative Approaches to the Design Process was published by Bloomsbury in December 2020. She is an editor of Fashion Practice: The Journal of Design, Creative Process and the Fashion Industry. Please visit her website at www.fionadieffenbacher.com.