A seminar with

Ali Nematollahy, Associate Professor of French at Baruch College and
The Graduate Center, CUNY
James Melo, ERC’s musicologist and Senior Editor at RILM

When the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason in 1894 by a French military tribunal and imprisoned, French society erupted into a fireball of anti-Semitism and political partisanship that called into question the very nature of French identity. This tragic private drama played out in a very public arena, and truth itself was on trial. Not only the press but also artists, writers, and musicians became entangled in a controversy that lasted almost two decades and continues to resonate to this day. The seminar will address the cultural, political, and musical repercussions of the Dreyfus Affair and its relevance for today’s political climate.

Monday, April 17, 5:30—7:30

CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
Skylight Room, 9th floor

FREE ADMISSION

For more information:
212-817-8606; jmelo@gc.cuny.edu
Presented by the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, CUNY, and the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in connection with ERC’s theatrical concert The Dreyfus Affair at Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM.

To find out more about ERC’s theatrical concerts, visit our website: www.romanticcentury.org

Ali Nematollahy is Associate Professor of French at Baruch College and the Graduate Center. He has published on nineteenth century literature and politics, such as Proudhon, Nietzsche’s reception in France prior to 1900, Jules Vallès, Georges Darien, and Hugues Rebell among others and is currently working on the counter-revolutionary currents of the period of Directoire and Empire and their relations to early Romanticism.

James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, Austria, and the United States, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfonica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. He is the program annotator for the recordings of Villa-Lobos’s complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos and solo piano music on Naxos.