Upcoming Events
Thursday, September 22, 2022 • 7:00 pm • Bucher Meetinghouse
DALE BROWN BOOK AWARD LECTURE
Moravian Soundscapes: Hearing New Histories of Early America
This presentation explores the soundscapes and musical practices of eighteenth-century Moravian mission communities in eastern Pennsylvania. The sonic histories of these religious communities provide new insights into the ways that music and sound functioned as a site of cultural encounter between German missionaries and Indigenous communities in early America, demonstrating the rich and multifaceted meanings that eighteenth-century music and religious history hold for contemporary Americans.
Sarah Eyerly is associate professor and Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor of Musicology at Florida State University. Her research interests include sound studies, performance practice, music and religion, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and the geo-humanities. Her current projects include a biography and documentary film on the life of the eighteenth-century Mohican musician, Joshua; heritage tourism and Indigenous representation at Moravian mission sites in Ohio; and sound reconstruction of the Apalachee and Spanish musical culture of Mission San Luis in Tallahassee, FL. She serves on the board of the American Musicological Society and the Mozart Society of America, and is coordinator of the musicology area at Florida State and director of the early music program. Her first book, Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early America (Indiana University Press, 2020), received the Young Center's Dale W. Brown Book Award.
Thursday, October 20, 2022 • 7:00 pm • Bucher Meetinghouse
LECTURE
Virtually Amish: Preserving Community at the Internet’s Margins
The Amish are famous for their disconnection from the modern world and all its devices. But Old Order Amish today are selectively engaging with digital communication technology. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two Old Order Amish settlements in Indiana, Lindsay Ems finds that the Amish do not allow digital communication technologies to drive their behavior; instead, they actively configure their sociotechnical world to align with their values and protect their community's autonomy. This talk will explore the various decisions made by members of Amish communities to guide digital communication technology use in an effort to maintain community wellness.
Lindsay Ems is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her research explores the social impacts of digital communication technologies. Specifically, in her teaching and research she aims to better understand the social forces that are often inconspicuously embedded into the technologies we all use today for relationship-building and maintenance, and workplace collaboration. Her new book, Virtually Amish: Preserving Community at the Internet’s Margins, explores approaches to resisting the damaging forces of high-tech capitalism that impact all who live and work in today’s information society, as deployed in Old Order Amish communities.
Thursday, November 10, 2022 • 7:00 pm • Bucher Meetinghouse
SNOWDEN LECTURE
Keeping Track of Settlement and Population Growth of the Amish in North America
It is estimated that the Amish population is doubling every 20-22 years, which is an amazing rate of growth for any group of people, anywhere in the world. Likewise, the number of settlements or communities is doubling at nearly the same pace. This lecture will examine how this growth has come about and the geographic expansion of the Amish beyond Pennsylvania and several midwestern states, into the southern, western, and New England regions, as well as Canadian provinces both to the east and west of their historic locations in Ontario. Population and settlement growth is a product of both internal forces, such as high fertility/large families combined with a high rate of baptism by daughters and sons into the Amish faith; and external forces, such as advantageous land prices and the rise of non-agricultural economic opportunities, especially carpentry and sawmill work, among others. The lecture will conclude with projections of population and settlement growth to the mid-century as possible presentiments of change in their cultural and social fabric.
Joe Donnermeyer is professor emeritus in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. Although a criminologist for most of his academic career, he has a deep and continuing interest in the social, cultural, and economic changes affecting the Amish. Donnermeyer has published two books and numerous peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles about the Amish. He cofounded and serves as coeditor of the Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities , which is part of the digital library at The Ohio State University.
Videos of Past Events