On Saturday night December 9th, at the Fondation des États-Unis (http://www.feusa.org/) in Paris, Todd Decker and Kelly Daniel-Decker performed a concert entitled "Hollywood Heroines" (http://www.feusa.org/hollywood-heroines/). It was the final event of a three-year, five-conference, international scholarly project on the Hollywood musical film (http://musicalmc2.labex-arts-h2h.fr/en) funded by Labex Arts-H2H, a humanities institute at Université Paris 8, and directed by French film professors Marguerite Chabrol and Pierre-Olivier Toulza.
During the conference, Todd and Kelly Decker gave a scholarly talk with live musical examples titled "'Watch My Mouth': The Image of the Voice in the Hollywood Musical" and Todd gave a talk on Fred Astaire's philosophical conception of the film dancer.
The project, an interdisciplinary mix of French, American, and British scholars, has been working on a collaborative digital humanities project: a bilingual web-based database that's not yet ready to go public but that will eventually serve scholars and students interested in research on the classical Hollywood musical.
This month, the project published a collection of essays titled Star Turns in the Hollywood Musical in separate French and English editions (http://www.lespressesdureel.com/ouvrage.php?id=5983&menu=).
Todd Decker has a chapter in the book titled "Fred Astaire, Captain America, and the Cyborg: The Technological Body of a Musical Star." Last year, Todd Decker was a visiting International Chair at Labex for a month (http://www.labex-arts-h2h.fr/todd-decker.html).
