Keynote Speakers

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

Dr. Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is an Associate Professor in African Anthropology at University College London (UCL). She teaches in both SELCS (the School of European Languages, Culture and Society) and the Anthropology department. 

Dr. Neveu Kringelbach has a lifelong interest in dance and has done research on dance, social mobility, gender and notions of self in Dakar, Senegal. The monograph coming out of this research, Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal (Berghahn Books) was awarded the 2013 Amaury Talbot Prize in African Anthropology by the RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute). She is currently working on a book project on binational marriage and transnational family relationships between Senegal and France. The book looks at how interracial, multicultural marriage and intimate relationships continue to be shaped by colonial imaginaries as well as racialised immigration policies in contemporary Europe. 

In 2019-22, she served as Vice-Dean EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) for the Arts & Humanities Faculty. Dr. Neveu Kringelbach is one of the academic leads of the [Black Europe] workstream at UCL’s European Institute (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/black-europe-1).

Joshua D. Pilzer

Joshua D. Pilzer is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching focus on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music.

His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012. His second book, Quietude, was published in 2022 and is an ethnography of the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their children. Quietude won the Alan Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently writing an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on vocal imitation and the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority, tentatively entitled Voices in the Mirror: Voicing and the Production of Power in Everyday Japanese Life.