Feminine Soundscapes
Event Details
Despite their limited agency, colonial Mexico City nuns blossomed in creativity. They integrated slaves of African descent as the main characters of their Christmas carols and inspired unusual iconographies that claimed feminine divine musical essence. Tune in to Dr. Carolina Sacristán and Dr. Sarah Finley as they not only discuss how poets Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and others found their voices in the complex soundscapes of their time, but also share revitalized versions of centuries-old religious music.
Funding by The Thoma Foundation Lecture Series.
Carolina Sacristán, Associate Professor, School of Humanities and Education Tecnológico de Monterrey
Carolina Sacristán is associate professor at the School of Humanities and Education of the Tecnológico de Monterrey (campus Monterrey and Puebla), where she teaches on Cultural Heritage, Cultural Imaginaries, and Symbolic Structures of Image, Literature and Music. She holds a Ph. D. in Art History (UNAM) and is a harpsichordist (Conservatory Arrigo Pedrollo in Vicenza). After exploring the links between visual culture and music of the viceregal period, she is now launching a project on Mexican devotional music of the 19th century with a feminist perspective.
Sarah Finley, Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, Christopher Newport University
Sarah Finley is Associate Professor of Spanish. Training in literature, musicology and vocal performance supports her research on sound and music in the early modern Hispanic world. Finley is the author of Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). The book focuses on poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s auditory inheritance by relating acoustical tropes in the author’s writing to seventeenth-century ideas about music, sound transmission, and hearing . Finley also explores performance and other auditory modes as methods for re-sounding marginalized voices from the past.
Feature Image Credit: Author Unknown, Christ Child Redeemer, Mexico City, ca. 1730, Oil on canvas, Private Collection.