Associate Professor Sarah Collins: ‘The Unproductive Arts?: Cultural Economy after Covid’

The Callaway Lecture is one of the most prestigious events on the Conservatorium of Music calendar. Over the last two decades, a host of distinguished speakers have taken to the podium to deliver their thoughts on subjects as broad ranging as the effects of music on the mind, and the place of music in the arts.

This lecture will explore the history of how economic thinkers have struggled to incorporate the arts into systems of value, and what this struggle tells us about how we might approach ideas about the 'cultural economy' post-Covid, given the pandemic's devastating impact on the arts.

Biography

Sarah Collins is Associate Professor and Chair of Musicology at the UWA Conservatorium of Music. In 2019 she was awarded the prestigious McCredie Musicological Award, Australian Academy of Humanities.

In her research she seeks to understand how the arts (particularly music, literature and film) shaped ways of thinking about political, ethical and economic concepts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Over the past five years, Sarah has held academic and research posts in Durham, Boston, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and now Perth, with her family coming along for the ride.

Her interest in exploring the aesthetic aspects of politics and the political aspects of aesthetics comes from witnessing large-scale changes in ideas about individualism and liberal democracy in recent years.

Sarah is currently working on a range of projects that circulate on ideas about the arts and internationalism, commemoration, cultural memory, ethics and virtue, democracy and the ‘liberal imagination’. This work will help us understand how political ideas and collective identities are shaped, maintained and disrupted by cultural forms.

Free entry

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