A guest lecture by David Boucher, part of The Secret Chord Project: Exploring the Religious in Popular Music Through the Works of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

Professor David Boucher studied at the University of Wales, Swansea, The London School of Economics and Liverpool University. He was a tutorial fellow at Cardiff, 1980-83, and a lecturer, 1983-4. He was a senior lecturer at La Trobe University Melbourne, a research fellow, and senior lecturer at the Australian National University, and professor of politics at University of Wales Swansea, before returning to Cardiff in 2000 as a Professorial Fellow. He is currently professor of political theory, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Johannesburg, and Director of the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre since 1993. He was the founding Director of the Graduate School in Humanities at Cardiff.

Besides his extensive portfolio of books and works on political theory, Professor Boucher has also published widely on various facets of popular music. Boucher has applied some of the political theories on which he worked over the years to aspects of popular culture. In Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (Continuum, 2004 and 2017), he applied hermeneutic and aesthetic theories to the lyric poetry of two of the leading icons of the 1960s, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, in order to explore the political culture of their day. This book has been translated into six languages, including Spanish, Serbian and Polish. It has been re-issued following the death of Leonard Cohen and the conferment of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Bob Dylan. Boucher extended this research to explore the relationship with Bob Dylan, the Beats, and Dylan Thomas. With various experts in the field including Jeff Towns, Michael Gray, Michael Jones and Danny Williams he has presented multi-media events at a variety of literary festivals and travelled extensively around Wales in 2013 promoting the Dylan Thomas Centenary. Boucher's most recent work in this area has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music (2013) and Symbiosis (2016). His recent publication includes Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: Deaths and Entrances with Lucy Boucher (Bloomsbury, 2021).

The Secret Chord Project explores the influence of religious concepts and imagery in popular music, with a particular focus on Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, two of the most influential singer-songwriters of our time. This project brings together leading scholars specializing in Dylan and Cohen, individuals who had personal connections to them, musicians, songwriters, as well as the Director of the internationally recognized Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa. These events offer rare opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students across campus communities—as well as Rochester’s broader community—to engage with them and their scholarship.

Sponsored by the Department of Religion & Classics, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Humanities Center, the Arthur Satz Department of Music, the Departmetn of English, the Institute for Popular Music, and the Eastman School of Music.