April Brown Bag Chat featuring Victoria Dalzell, PhD (virtual)

How do world religions operate in local contexts? This month, the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center will feature Dr. Victoria Dalzell for our Facebook Live April Brown Bag Chat. This program will be on Wednesday, April 21, at noon. We will discuss Christianity, Hinduism, ethnicity, identity, and musical performance among the Tharu people of Nepal. Dalzell will share insights from living in Nepal as well as research conducted for her dissertation “Freedom, Margins and Music: Musical Discourses of Tharu Ethnicity in Nepal” (2015). Director of Education Neal Matherne will follow this discussion by recounting the career of Enid’s own Vida Chenowith (1928–2018) who studied the music of New Guinea. Visit www.facebook.com/CSRHC/ to view the program.

Victoria Dalzell (who prefers to go by Tori) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on ethnicity, ritual, and belonging in Nepal and the Himalayan region of South Asia. Her work has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Fulbright IIE, and published in academic journals that focus on social science research in Asia. She received her PhD in music from the University of California Riverside in 2015 and continues to reside in Southern California. Tori currently works as a writing coach in several university writing centers, where she teaches students, faculty, and staff from a variety of disciplines how to create better writing processes and become more confident communicators. When we return to some semblance of normalcy, she is looking forward to once again singing in the choir and performing on wind and percussion instruments with UCR’s Latin American music ensemble.