Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors, featuring Ed Pavlić: What’s so special about the music of Atlanta, Insecure, I May Destroy You, and Queen Sono?

The humanities faculty at UGA are piloting a new series on campus featuring accessible talks about TV shows: Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors. The series highlights the sorts of questions and analytical modes that are characteristic of humanistic thinking, while making connections through mutual interests in pop culture. It's an a.v.-club-slash-humanities spin on UGA’s motto, Et docere et rerum exquirere causas. Talks are about 30 minutes long, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Free lunch, students of all majors welcome.

What's so special about the music of Atlanta, Insecure, I May Destroy You, and Queen Sono?

In the 1950s James Baldwin wrote that "it is only in his music that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story." Back then, Baldwin held that Black musical textures signaled a story "which no American is prepared to hear." In film and television for the decades that followed, a wide gap yawned, at times howled, between the music and the characters. Midway in the 2010s, however, the gap between music and filmic elements narrowed. In this talk, Professor Ed Pavlić will highlight how Black characters and Black music weave together in unprecedented closeness in four recent series whose nuance and complexity rivals, and at times surpasses, that of our best contemporary writing.

Ed Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies and affiliated faculty in Creative Writing. He teaches classes mainly in modern and contemporary African American and American poetry, fiction, film and music as well as courses in creative writing.