Past Event: Lecture: Meanings of Transcendence: Pushing Past Limits in Creativity, Morality & Desire

This event has passed.

Location: Miller Hall
406 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Admission: Free; no tickets or registration

Open to: General Public

Event description: A lecture on the meanings of transcendence by Vernon White, Visiting Professor in Theology at King’s College London and Senior Fellow of the Westminster Abbey Institute. Sponsored by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

This event will consist of the guest lecture from 2 p.m. - 3 p.m., followed by a wine and cheese reception from 3 p.m. - 4 p.m.

Speaker Biography: Vernon White is Visiting Professor in Theology at King’s College London, and Senior Fellow of the Westminster Abbey Institute.

After studying at Cambridge and Oxford he has held a variety of posts in Church and Academy, and was most recently Canon Theologian and Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey. He has a longstanding concern for both academic and public theology, and has published widely in the area of philosophical theology, Christian doctrine, social ethics. His most recent publications were Purpose and Providence. Taking Soundings in Western Thought, Theology, and Literature (London, 2015/2018), & Meaning, Mattering, Transcendence. Essays on Meaning, Mattering, and God (Eugene, Oregon, 2023).

Contact: Rachel Segger rachel.segger@yale.edu

Davesh Soneji is associate professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from McGill University, and his research interests lie at the intersections of social and cultural history, religion, and anthropology. For the past two decades, Prof. Soneji has produced research that focuses primarily on religion and the performing arts in South India, but also includes work on gender, class, caste, and colonialism. He is best known for his work on the social history of professional female artists in Tamil and Telugu-speaking South India and is author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012; Permanent Black, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from The Association for Asian Studies (AAS). He is also editor of Bharatanāṭyam: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010; 2012) and co-editor, with Indira Viswanathan Peterson, of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (Oxford University Press, 2008). Prof. Soneji has recently held positions as Visiting Professor at the Central University of Hyderabad in India, as well as Le Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) in Paris. Prior to coming to the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Soneji taught at McGill University’s School of Religious Studies in Montreal, Canada for over twelve years.

Prof. Soneji’s more recent research spans a wide range of subjects related to the history of music in modern South India, including occluded traditions of Tamil Islamic music, Tamil Catholic music, Marathi kīrtan in the Tamil-speaking regions, the music of the Tamil theatre, and transoceanic sonic histories of the Tamil diaspora. Attentive to caste-based hierarchies of taste, Dalit sonicscapes, musical migration, musical dispossession, and the question of “popular Tamil music” as a historical phenomenon, this new work is forthcoming in a monograph titled Unbounded Tunes: Genealogies of Musical Pluralism in Modern South India. He is also presently editing a volume of essays entitled Caste, Community, and the Performing Arts of Modern South India (forthcoming, Routledge) that highlights new work by a group of emerging scholars, and with Anna Morcom, is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Indian Music. For the 2023-24 academic year he is a fellow at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music.