Guest Speaker: “A Greater History of Music in the Age of Enlightenment: Colonial Gaze and Uses of Non-European Acoustic Objects”, Mélanie Traversier (History, Université de Lille)

The Lad Taiyota, Native of Otaheite, in the dress of his Country, from Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty’s Ship the Endeavour, London, Printed for Stanfield Parkinson, the editor, and sold by Richardson and Urquhart, etc., 1773, pl. IX.

Mélanie Traversier is Professor of Early Modern History at the Université de Lille and former member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses on the social history of performing arts in Enlightenment Europe and colonies, especially on the careers of musicians and on the encounters between music, sciences, medicine, and innovation in the 18^th century. She has published most recently a monograph L’harmonica de verre et Miss Davies. Essai sur la mécanique du succès au siècle des Lumières (2021), and co-edited two volumes, La musique a-t-elle un genre? (2019), and Spectatrices ! Les femmes au spectacle de l’Antiquité à nos jours (2022). Her co-edited volume on Vie et Technique. Approches historiques, philosophiques et anthropologiques is forthcoming in 2023. She is also a professional actress (comedy-ballet of Molière, Les Fâcheux). Her next performance is inspired by women alpinists, especially Henriette d’Angeville, the first woman to have successfully climbed Mont Blanc (1838).