The Institute for Bob Dylan Studies is thrilled to host Florence Dore, whose blend of music performance and scholarship shatters the boundaries of traditional media to achieve a deeper understanding of the ways in which popular music elevates performers and listeners alike.
Dore is a trained literary scholar, professor, and musician. She will give an illustrated talk, weaving together rock music, history, and American literary fiction. Dore’s talk will cover two major figures in American music, Lucinda Williams and Lead Belly, and their relationship to American letters. She will then illustrate her discussion of American music with songs from her latest record, Highways and Rocketships. The record emerges from the same musical traditions as Williams and Lead Belly and blends them together with various influences such as surf rock and country western.
In her latest literary work, Ink in the Grooves: Conversations on Literature and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Dore expounds on her literary and musical influences. She takes an autoethnographic approach in her introduction and discusses how in her undergraduate days she found herself reading elite, high-art literature by day, and performing popular, “lowbrow” rock music by night. “There has always been bleed” between high and low art, she writes, “but at present we are witness to its utter erasure.” Ink in the Grooves goes on to feature several artists and writers who explore or exemplify the dissolved boundaries between the literary and the musical.
Join us this Friday September 23 at 5:00pm at the Zarrow Center for her illustrated talk. The following night, Dore and her band will join Waylon Payne to perform at 9pm at the Mercury Lounge. Get your tickets now!
Florence Dore, musician and author, is touring on her new record Highways and Rocketships. Florence recently played opening slots for Steve Earle, Son Volt, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, and Southern Culture on the Skids and has had airplay on SiriusXM radio shows hosted by Steve Earle and Mojo Nixon on Outlaw Country. With Joe Swank at the helm doing radio, her record has been out a week and she’s already managed to get to the top 20 on the Alt.country chart.
As a literary scholar, Dore joined the University of North Carolina faculty in 2010. She is a singer/songwriter and an academic, having published books and articles as well as released albums, and teaching in both the creative writing and literature programs at Carolina. She has held fellowships at New York University, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC, has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. A member of the Steering Committee for Post45, a collective of scholars working on American Literature and Culture since 1945, Dore was also a founding co-editor for the Post45 Book Series at Stanford University Press. She sits on the advisory board for the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa.