Plenary Speakers
“Boundary Crossing, Religion, and Music”
Dr. Randall J. Stephens
Randall J. Stephens is Professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. He is a historian of religion, conservatism, the South, environmentalism, and popular culture. He is the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2008); The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with physicist Karl Giberson (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); and editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). His latest book is The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Dr. Nina Öhman
Nina Öhman is the President of the board of the Finnish American Studies Association (FASA). She works as a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. Öhman is a musicologist/ethnomusicologist studying women’s roles in music cultures, the singing voice, and American popular music. While situated broadly in musicology her work incorporates varied branches of knowledge including, inter alia, economic ethnomusicology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. She is the editor-in-chief of Musiikin suunta -journal and serves as the vice-chair of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology (SES).