NYU 2025 LeBoff Public Lecture

Tue Apr 08

6 pm - 7:30 pm ET

8th Floor Commons

239 Greene Street, New York, NY 10003

Cost:

FREE

Join us for the 2025 LeBoff Public Lecture, delivered by Professor Karen Tongson.

Since the turn of the millennium, a narrative about karaoke has emerged in the broader cultural discourse reassuring white, mostly middle-aged heterosexual men that they, too, can love again, and truly live again despite suffering numerous heartbreaks and other devastating losses. These reluctant practitioners of karaoke are grieving not only lost loves, but more significantly, themselves in late and end-stage capitalism.

In these journeys through, if not actually towards sentimentality, these scripted, yet sincere narratives of white-hetero-male-redemption in movies and books are among the reasons karaoke has achieved such an astounding level of popularity and earned contingent forms of mainstream acceptance in the United States since Y2K. Karaoke is yet another crucible in the trajectory of the Cruel Optimism Lauren Berlant describes in their book about the “affective scenarios” employed to manage the banal, but nevertheless traumatic precarities of life at the end of the republic.

The 2025 LeBoff Public Lecture is part of the NYU LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program, sponsored through the generous support of Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff. The program brings to the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication the world's most prominent scholars, writers, and creative thinkers in media, communication, and cultural studies.

An asian presenting person with short hair looks at the camera. They are standing in front of a pink flowering bush.

A professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, English, and American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California, Karen Tongson is one of the world’s leading experts in queer of color studies, popular culture studies, and sound studies. She has written numerous books and essays for academic presses as well as for public-facing venues, including her most recent monograph Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us. She is the founder and director of the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race & Public Culture at USC Dornsife.

NYU provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Please submit your request for accommodations for events and services at least two weeks before the date of your accommodation need. Although we can't guarantee accommodation requests received less than two weeks before the event, you should still contact us and we will do our best to meet your accommodation need. Please email Department of Media, Culture, and Communication for assistance.