CARLA FRECCERO is Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She was trained primarily in the field of Renaissance Studies, and is the author of several books and articles in that field, including the co-edited volume Premodern Sexualities (Routledge, 1995). She also writes on and studies U.S. popular culture. Her Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU Press, 1999) includes essays on 2 Live Crew, Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and Madonna’s "Like a Prayer." Her talk will be a discussion of the waning of critique in mass-mediated popular culture and in critical studies thereof.

BERNARD GENDRON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His books include Technology and the Human Condition (St. Martin’s, 1976) and Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2002). His talk is on rock‘n’roll’s acquisition of hegemonic cultural capital, in spite of the assumption that jazz has higher aesthetic status. He writes: "My objective is twofold: to show the importance of studying the interrelationships of the jazz and rock fields, and to enrich our understanding of the complexities of cultural capital in popular music."

NORMAN KLEIN is a cultural critic, curator, urban and media historian, novelist, and professor at the California Institute of the Arts. His books include The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Verso, 1997) and Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (Verso, 1993). His book-in-progress is entitled The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects, a history of special effects environments including f/x cinema, cyberspace, and digitalized Hollywood. His talk considers new points of origin for our current crisis in the arts and its institutions, and new points of departure for digital media, the urban imaginary, and the novel.

ERIC PORTER is Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of What is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (U. of California, 2002). Porter writes about African American history, popular music, and race and ethnicity. His talk on black music that straddles the line between "the popular" and "the avant-garde," shows how popular/avant-garde artists’ agendas and the critical spaces they open up provide a rich terrain for exploring a variety of questions pertaining to the political value of black music.

TRICIA ROSE is Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan, 1994) received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995. Her oral narrative project on black women’s sexuality in America, entitled Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy, will be published this year by Farrar, Straus, Giroux. She has published widely in scholarly journals as well as in national publications such as Time, The New York Times, and The Village Voice. She will lead a discussion on methodological issues in popular culture research.