From a UW press release:
Ulrich Adelt, the University of Wyoming's 2007-08 visiting assistant professor in African American Studies, will lecture Tuesday, April 1, on the politics of blues music.
Adelt's presentation, titled "Just Play the Blues: African-Americans, Afro-Germans, white Germans and the Politics of Primitivism," begins at 6 p.m. in Room 142 of the UW Classroom Building. A reception follows. The event is free and open to the public.
"Professor Adelt's lecture includes components of his research and teaching that focus on the politics of blues music," says Gracie Lawson-Borders, director of African American Studies at UW. "The lecture should afford us an opportunity to hear the social and political discourse surrounding blues music during the folk festival in 1962 and the continuing research on the music's aesthetic and political relevance in the U.S. and abroad."
Adelt's lecture is built around the story of Horst Lippmann, a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and Fritz Rau, a former member of the Hitler Youth, a pair of white German concert promoters who organized the American Folk Blues Festival in East and West Germany and other European countries in the early 1960s.
Adelt received his M.A. in American studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany in 2000 and his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Iowa in 2007. He has published articles in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society and the Journal of Popular Culture, and is working on a book project tentatively titled "Black, White and Blue: Racial Politics of Blues Music in the 1960s."
For more information, call Carol Robillard at (307) 766-2481 or e-mail crobilla@uwyo.edu.
