By Senior Lecturer Danielle V. Schoon (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), Associate Professor Ryan Skinner (School of Music) and Danielle Fosler-Lussier (School of Music)

The Ohio State University was honored to welcome guest scholar, Professor Sonia Tamar Seeman, from the University of Texas-Austin, on Monday, January 27, 2020. Seeman visited two undergraduate classes (Contemporary Issues in Turkey taught by Danielle Schoon in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Musical Citizenship taught by Ryan Skinner in the School of Music), where she shared her published work and guided students through considerations such as the relationship between music and identity and the role of minority citizens in the making of the nation state.

Seeman’s public lecture, "Music as Labor; Music as Work: 100 years of Turkish Roman Musician Narratives," was co-sponsored by the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme's Migration, Mobility and Immobility Project and presented as part of the Lectures in Musicology series, co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries. In her lecture, Seeman discussed Roman (“Gypsy”) professional musicianship in Turkey as it transitioned from an early-modern focus on craftsmanship to a period of capitalist exchange of labor for cash. Her ethnographic research culls from 25 years of fieldwork and close family relationships and documents the lives of Turkish Roman professional musicians in their own words, recordings and lived experiences. It forms the outline of a new book project.