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2018 Piediscalzi Lecture in Religion and American Culture

Religion Around Billie Holiday

Dr. Tracy Fessenden
The Steve and Margaret Forster Professor in Comparative Mythology
Arizona State University

Thursday, March 29, 2018
3:30-5:00 pm
156 A-B Student Union
(Endeavor Room)

Soulful jazz singer Billie Holiday is remembered today for her unique sound, troubled personal history, and a catalogue that includes such resonant songs as 鈥淪trange Fruit鈥� and 鈥淕od Bless the Child.鈥� In this lecture, Tracy Fessenden will discuss the surprising ways in which Holiday and her music were also strongly shaped by religion. Mixing elements of biography with the history of race and American music, she will explore the multiple religious influences on Holiday鈥檚 life and sound, including her time spent as a child in a Baltimore convent, the echoes of black Southern churches in the blues she heard in brothels, the secular riffs on ancestral faith in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Jewish songwriting culture of Tin Pan Alley. Growing out of Fessenden鈥檚 most recent publication, Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State UP, 2018), the lecture aims to illuminate the power and durability of religion in the making of an American musical icon.聽

Tracy Fessenden holds the Steve and Margaret Forster Professorship in Comparative Mythology at Arizona State University, where she is a member of the faculty of Religious Studies. She is a scholar of American religion and the secular who focuses on literature and the arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.聽 In addition to Religion Around Billie Holiday, Fessenden is the author of聽Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature聽(Princeton UP, 2007) and co-editor of聽The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and American Literature聽(Routledge, 2001),聽and Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference(Columbia UP, 2013). She is Editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation and General Editor of the North American Religions series at New York University Press.

This lecture is free and open to the public.聽聽

For more information, please contact the Department of Religion at 937-775-2274 or religion@wright.edu

*Note for first-year聽Honors听蝉迟耻诲别苍迟蝉:聽Fall 2017 first-year聽Honors听蝉迟耻诲别苍迟蝉 are required to attend one聽Dialogue聽during the 2017-2018 academic year to maintain priority registration status. Students not satisfying the聽Dialogue聽requirement will lose their priority registration status for one semester (Spring 2019).聽Look for the聽BLUE FOLDER聽to record your attendance on the sign-in sheet.