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

Professor Marcia Pally teaches at New York University and held the Mercator Guest Professorship in the theology department at Humboldt University-Berlin, where she is an annual guest professor and member of the Center for Interreligious Theology and Religious Studies and the Berlin Institute for Public Theology. In 2019-2020 she was a Fellow at The Center for Theological Inquiry (Princeton). Her research interests are culture, religion, and politics as well as the intersection of culture and language. She is the author of several books in each area,  including: White Evangelicals and Right-wing Populism: HOW DID WE GET HERE? (2022); From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (2021); Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality (2016); Mimesis and Sacrifice (2019, Ed.); The New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good  (2011). Prof. Pally was twice a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study-Berlin and spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2010. She has been awarded many grants, including from the German Research Foundation,* the German Academic Exchange Service, among others. Prof. Pally has given talks and lectures at wide range of universities and professional associations, among, them Oxford University; the Center for Theological Inquiry (Princeton); Institut d’études européennes et internationales du Luxembourg; John F. Kennedy School for North American Studies, Free University-Berlin; Centre of Theology and Philosophy, The Cato Institute; Hebrew Union College, among many others.

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.