The Rose Bente Lee Ostapenko Center for Ethics in Medicine and Healthcare and Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat present the next session of the Literature and Social Justice Speaker Series that inaugurated last fall.

This event will take place on September 29 and will feature Dan DiPiero, who is an Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Boston University.

The itinerary for this event (which will take place in 405/406/407 Glynn Hall) consists of the following:

12:30p-1:15p - Meet and Greet
This informal get together offers students and faculty the opportunity to speak to Professor DiPiero. His research is situated at the intersection of popular music. gender and feminism, and affect studies. He is eager to converse with members of the Niagara University community.

1:30p-2:45p - Book Discussion
Professor DiPiero will be discussing his upcoming book, Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl (Michigan UP, 2025). For those who would like an advanced copy of the book, please email Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat. 

3:00p-4:15p - Lecture and Q&A (with snacks and refreshments)
Professor DiPiero will give a talk on popular music and public health, entitled "Fire is Coming: On Popular Music and Feeling Badly." 

Abstract:

This talk attempts to map out several relationships between popular music and public health, with a particular focus on experiences of depression, anxiety, trauma, and the socio-political dynamics that contextualize such increasingly widespread feelings. Scholars in the humanities have long approached such negative affective states as complex entanglements, where medical diagnoses often but not always account for the complexity of depressive feeling. I first walk through some prominent engagements between such more-than-clinical understandings and the popular music that speaks to variegated shades of bad feelings, from “sad girl” artists like Lana Del Rey to the white male rage indexed by the “butt rock renaissance.”
After surveying this literature, the talk shifts to focus on the stain of contemporary indie rock music I discuss in my book Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl. A key example from Indigo De Souza’s second album, “Real Pain” features the layered screams of De Souza’s fans, who sent recordings of themselves at the artist’s request. Hailing the young and marginalized listeners disproportionately affected by climate grief, attacks on reproductive freedom, and more, De Souza’s fans willingly surrender control over their own emotions in the space of a concert in order to be with others who experience similar genres of pain, forming a grief collective that De Souza re-creates on record, testifying to her own pain and the pain of others.

These events are open and free to the public. All are welcome!