We are less than two weeks away from the start of the Dylan@80 event and are eager to welcome a global audience to join us for a virtual celebration of Dylan’s eight extraordinary decades. The event will be hosted through Microsoft Teams, which will allow for a great degree of interaction and connection than typical streamed lectures and panels. Details will go out this week to registered participants and sneak-preview access will open early next week.
Throughout the conference, you will find a steady focus on archives and what they allow us to do as fan, scholars, writers and teachers. As rock music becomes an established part of our shared cultural history, our attention now turns to preserving its often ephemeral artifacts and organizing them for use by scholars, teachers, and others. The Bob Dylan Archive® is playing an important role in this work but is also one example among many. This session will feature scholars and archivists who have created, curated, and used both established and emerging archives built around some of rock’s singular figures.
Nick Meriwether, Archiving the Evanescent: The Challenges of Counterculture Collections
Nicholas G. Meriwether is a historian and archivist at the Center for Counterculture Studies. He was educated at Princeton and Cambridge and earned his MLIS at the University of South Carolina, where he served as Oral Historian at the South Caroliniana Library. He is the Executive Director of the Grateful Dead Studies Association.
Eileen Chapman, Thundering Roads
In 2011, Eileen facilitated an arrangement with the Asbury Park Library to convey The Bruce
Springsteen Archives to Monmouth University and on January 10, 2017, a new partnership with Bruce Springsteen to create The Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music was announced. The Center provides entertainment, knowledge, and insight into the works of Bruce Springsteen and other legendary figures of American music.
Robert de Young, Still Speaking to Us Sweetly
Dr Robert de Young worked for ABC Radio and Television in Australia and is a documentary filmmaker. He has produced and directed films on Errol Flynn, Peter Finch, Rod Taylor, Jerry Lewis, rock journalist Lillian Roxon, Sam Spiegel, and the 100-year history of Tarzan which have been screened in film festivals and broadcast throughout the world. He has been working in Los Angeles with the Leonard Cohen Archive Project since mid-2017.
Mark Davidson, Blood in the Stacks: The Bob Dylan Archives@ in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Mark Davidson is Bob Dylan Librarian and Collections Manager with the Bob Dylan Archive®. Davidson is the head archivist of the collection, and he works closely with Bob Dylan Archive curator, Michael Chaiken.
Ken Womack, Working the Gaps and the Silences
Kenneth Womack is one of the world’s foremost writers and thinkers about the Beatles. In addition to such titles as Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles (2007), the Cambridge Companion to the Beatles (2009), and The Beatles Encyclopedia: Everything Fab Four (2014), he is the author of a two-volume biography devoted to the life and work of Beatles producer George Martin, including Maximum Volume (2017) and Sound Pictures (2018).