NXT Curator Series: Historical Grooves: Archiving the Sounds of the Jewish-Muslim Relationship

What if listening for the past could change our understanding of history? In this interactive musical conversation, Professor Christopher Silver will detail his efforts to amplify a set of twentieth century North African Jewish and Muslim voices which for too long have remained silent in the historical record. Through selections from his first-of-its-kind archive of early twentieth century shellac records from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, he will draw our attention to the sublime sounds of the artists whose music shaped and spoke to an era of profound change and remarkable resilience.

Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. His first book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa was published in 2022 with Stanford University Press and was the winner of the 2023 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. He is also the founder and curator of the website Gharamophone.com, a digital archive of North African records from the first half of the twentieth century.

The NXT Curator Series is sponsored in part by the Putney Public Library.