No RSVP Required.
For more information, visit the conference webpage and article.
For questions, please email holley@ucla.edu.

Scholarly considerations of trauma and disability have evolved largely independently of one another over the past few decades, and yet their various lines of inquiry and close considerations of the human sensorium appear to share a great deal of substantive and meaningful overlap.  Our goal is to bring together artists and scholars whose work concerns music and trauma and/or disability studies in order to identify these areas of overlap, and to open up necessary dialogues between people who may be engaging with similar kinds of questions using different but complementary sets of  tools.  By coming together to understand the intersections between trauma and disability studies more vividly, this event will seek to develop frameworks that can be flexibly shared by scholars in music studies and other related fields, especially given the complex intertwining of disability and trauma that characterizes so much of human life today.

Watch Livestream

Thursday, October 16, 2025, 6pm

Opening Concert: LISTENING TO TRAUMA AND DISABILITY

FEATURING MARIA CHAVEZ, TURNTABLE ARTIST

5pm-6pm: OPEN GALLERY WALK of Installations

6pm-7:30pm: Lecture-Demos

Art Banymandhub
Michael Torres
Talus — Wendy Richman, viola, and Ken Ueno, live electronics

7:30pm: Conversation and Performance

Maria Chavez

Reception in Green Room

Friday October 17, 2025

12:30-12:45pm – Opening Remarks

12:45pm – 2:15pm – THEORIZING ASD, ADHD, AND SENSORY DISORDERS

Aziel Ressler, Untitled
Dan Wang, Attentional Form: Mediacy, ADHD, and Tierra Whack’s Whack World
Jessica Schwartz, Untitled

2:30pm-4:00pm – VOCAL PEDAGOGY PANEL 

Katherine Meizel
Anne Slovin
Emily Jaworski Koriath
Adam Moxness
Diane Kolin
Maria Georgakarakou
Marita Stryker
Ty Chiko

4:30pm-6:15pm – Keynote by Jill Rogers

Reception in Green Room

Saturday October 18, 2025

9:15am-11:15am – Deep Listening Workshop with Nomi Epstein

11am-12:30pm – MUSICAL THEATER AND TRAUMA PANEL (Holley Replogle-Wong, Chair)

Jessica Sternfeld
Ray Knapp
Judith Moreland
Student Performers from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television: Maisie McPeek, Ian Pirotto, Mireya Nevel, Nick Alcorn

2pm-3:30pm  –  DISABILITY, TRAUMA, AND HISTORICAL CONCERNS 

Erin Brooks, Listening Historically? Trauma, Disability, and Sound in America’s Midcentury Polio Epidemic
Luka Douridas, Healing on wax: Alternative medicine on record, 1945-1979
Sara Gerk, The Emigrant’s Lament: Immigration Trauma and US Popular Music in the Nineteenth Century

4pm-5:30pm  – TRAUMA AND DISABILITY IN MUSIC SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS (Jill Rogers, respondent)

Nicol Hammond, Untitled
Natalie Farrell, Toward a Popular Symphony: Confronting Trauma and Profiteering in Orchestral Community Outreach Programs
Phyllis Pan, Untitled

Sunday, October 19, 2025

9am-10:30am- CLOSE READINGS OF TRAUMA REPRESENTATIONS IN ART (Ashley Dao, Chair)

Emmie Head, The Cinesthetic Chef: Sonic Markers of Trauma and Memory in the Soundscapes of FX’s The Bear
James Deaville, Music, Race, and the Disabled City:  Representing Trauma and Restoration in the New Orleans of Treme
Molly Hennig, The Dialectic of Trauma Heard in the Testimony of Lingua Ignota’s Sinner Get Ready (2021) and Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers (2022)

11am-12pm – TRAUMA AND DISABILITY:  SLIPPAGES AND OVERLAPS (Jenny Olivia Johnson, Chair)

Kaleb Goldschmitt, Trauma, Disability, or Both? The Case of Sonic Sensitivity in Popular Media
Maria Cizmic, On Bodies and Narratives: Complex Embodiment, Psychiatric Disability, and the Music of Daniel Johnson

This program is made possible by the Joyce S and Robert U. Nelson Fund. Robert Uriel Nelson was a revered musicologist and music professor at UCLA, who, together with his wife, established a generous endowment for the university to make programs like this possible.

This program is sponsored by the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, the Dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Associate Dean of Inclusive Excellence, by the Walter H. Rubsamen Music Library and the UCLA Music Library’s Hugo and Christine Davise Fund.