An Illustrated Lecture with Dr James Kennaway, Historian at Newcastle University

Date: Monday, September 29th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )

Can music make girls lose all sexual restraint, causing nymphomania, pregnancy and the collapse of social order? Can Heavy Metal songs make American teenagers shoot themselves and/or other people? Can music can whip crowds into a frenzy, leaving them the pitiful stooges of Communist or other sinister causes? Can it can be used with other forms of thought control to turn people into Manchurian Candidate-style automatons? Probably not, but over the past two hundred years plenty of people have said so. This talk will outline the history of this debate, from eighteenth-century anxieties about the effect of the piano on teenage girls to Fox News theories that Gangnam Style is like a drug.

Dr James Kennaway is a historian at Newcastle University. He has previously worked at Oxford, Stanford and Vienna. His book “Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease” was published in 2012. He is now working on a project about ‘Fashionable Diseases’.